Having conversations with business and engineering leadership regarding the availability of a public develop portal, API catalog, SDKs, and feedback loops is in the top five of the conversations that occur regularly with API Evangelist audience and customers. Helping enterprise leadership see the importance of providing a robust public catalog of digital resources is a big part of that, but helping emphasize the missed opportunity for storytelling is also at the top of our list. Too much energy is spent worrying about what gets published to a public API portal that massive opportunities for influencing the public in these ways are missed.
- Talent Acquisition - Attracting and influencing engineering talent is at the top of the list of reasons enterprises have public API portals.
- Internal Influence - Many employees will overlook or dismiss an internal memo or story, but will give a different weight to what is public.
- Building Trust - Establishing your voice via the blog, forums, press release, case studies, webinars, and other formats helps build trust.
- Someone is Home - The presence your API developer portal provides helps send the signal that someone is home and there to help.
- Misdirection - Alpha releases, prototypes, and other ideas can be used to distract competitors while also stimulating the imagination.
It is easy to get caught up in what you might be giving away via your enterprise public API portal. But in reality you should be thinking more about how you can use your public API portal to drive the public conversation around your company. The APIs you publish to your API portal are secured—you aren’t giving anything away with proper API authentication, encryption, logging, and usage reporting. However, without an API portal, you aren’t controlling the narrative around your enterprise. Regardless of what APIs you make available via your public API portal, you should always own the story that is being told about the technological vision of your enterprise.
