Why pragmatism and creativity are essential ingredients to rapidly scaling your API-first product strategy

We’re an API-first company that solves the complex problem of identity fraud for a large, global customer base. We’ll share stories of how we’ve adopted and adapted our API growth and governance strategy, product development process, and approach to developer experience as we’ve scaled.

We recognise the value of good developer experience at Onfido, and that a good API experience is essential to expose our product in a reliable, efficient, and scalable manner to our thousands of customers globally, representing multiple verticals and company maturity stages, as well as millions of end-users (b2b2c product). As we’ve grown and scaled as an organization, our approach has adapted along with the size and shape of our company! We’re excited to share perspectives and examples of how to maintain product predictability with pragmatism yet leaving room for creativity, for a successful API-led product strategy in a high-growth industry. We also want to present lessons we’ve learned along the way, and the tradeoffs we’ve made to deliver a product experience in this space with customer needs at the core.

This talk submission ties in with the official topic option “API strategy & governance and how they relate to API documentation”. I’m submitting this talk proposal on behalf of myself and my colleague Phoebe and we intend to present this talk jointly within the 30mins time slot. I currently lead our product team at Onfido looking after our API and integration experience (we think about developer experience more holistically than just developers), and Phoebe is a technical writer in the team. With the extensive learnings we’ve made being at Onfido in a hyper-growth environment, where we’ve had to adapt our API governance, roadmap and use plenty of EQ internally with other product teams and externally with our customers, we would like to give back to the community and share best practices and demonstrate examples that have worked best for us, while putting these into the larger context of API product strategy so that the full audience can benefit form it and apply what we share. I’ve been working as a product manager in a startup (from seed to Series-B) and a scale-up (Series-D and beyond) environment, in both cases API-first product experiences so have seen how API strategy evolves as a function of company maturity. Phoebe who is one of our key technical writers in the team will be able to share a range of examples of how we approach out integrator experience strategy to ensure ease of use, and drive adoption as well as ship a delightful experience to our users.