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A while ago, we published a post about the importance of the Developer Experience team in APIs business and, over the years, we have seen the growth and increased value of this team specialized in service in the development teams.
Below, we share some of the key points and actions that have generated benefits and maintained the alignment in the use of APIs (whether open or not) between company and developer.
1. Increased support for developers on onboarding and using APIs;
2. Monitoring the health of APIs and backend. Tracking the use of APIs, it is possible to identify potential drops and intermittences more quickly and thus communicate to the teams in charge with evidence to support regularization and stabilization as soon as possible;
3. Constant alignments and whenever necessary with partners. If during development, or even already in production, the developer has any questions, they will have an open channel with the DX team to contact and resolve all issues;
4. Remove the bottleneck of the consulting and customer internal technical teams, so that they are in fact focused on product evolution, while an API specialized team (and also with knowledge about their business) will support developers with their questions, issues and documentation updates that are relevant;
5. Creation of customized reports, so the customer also has a clear and detailed view of what is happening in the APIs;
6. Evolution of the Developer Portal, considering technical (together with our specialized UX team) as well as process documentation, guides and best practices for the devs who consume the APIs;
7. Identification of potential improvements, such as identifying HTTPStatus adjustments and standards, backend reading and processing (that is, returning an explanatory and clear message, being stable...), actions that would facilitate the use of a particular operation by the developer;
8. Efficient communication on the Dev Portal, where if there is any scheduled maintenance, for example (that may leave the API unavailable for a moment), there is a published and easily accessible announcement with this information;
9. Support internal customer teams regarding questions, alignments, metrics extraction. This helps to maintain internal support and a continuous and clear communication;
10. Assistance in scalability during seasonal periods (such as Mother's Day, Children's Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday) where the demand for integration with APIs increases, new partners/developers enter and, consequently, increase in traffic and use;
11. Monitor and take proactive actions to maintain the use of APIs and a healthy backend, combined with direct actions with developers and BE reporting to the customer. Hence, it is possible to avoid a potential error and an unnecessary burden.
Considering the reasons above, it is clear the importance and the need of a Developer Experience team to optimize development routines as a whole, supporting not only the internal team, but also customers and partners.
Technical teams have many demands to manage, with information to organize and even with internal and external communication of processes, and the implementation of a team responsible for APIs is a solution to these and many other challenges in the product area.
