DPR Git Pages Home — Roles Index

Role: API Product Owner

Persona

An API product owner operates at the intersection where API clients and providers meet. This leads to a constant struggle between fulfilling clients’ wishes and keeping the API on POINT and economically viable.

Information and Modeling Need

API product owners care about and require/produce information related to:

• Stakeholder concerns
• User experience
• Documentation, for example product road maps and API descriptions
• Service level agreements
• Quick overviews of external interfaces and internal structure of the produced software
• Cost vs. benefit of feature development, supportability, and evolvability of their products and services

Just like application and integration architects specializing on distributed systems and APIs, they wear six hats according to a blog post by James Higginbotham (and his Twitter network): API trendspotter, API reviewer, API risk assessor, API advocate, API creator, and API planner.

Collaborations

Roles to communicate with:

• API clients
• Application and Integration Architect
• Other roles not yet describes in DPR yet: domain experts, DevOps staff, etc.

Consumed/Produced Artifacts and Applied Practices

The API product owner participates in these activities (tasks):

• SMART NFR Elicitation
• Stepwise Service Design

The API product owner is responsible for the following artifacts:

• User Stories and/or Use Cases
• API Description a.k.a. service contract artifact
• Service Level Agreements and Rate Plans.

In a contributor or reviewer role, (s)he might also work with/on:

• Domain Model
• Candidate Endpoint List
• Refined Endpoint List

More Information

“Beyond Software Architecture” by Luke Hohmann is not API-specific, but covers software product management.

Data Provenance

title: "Design Practice Repository (DPR): API Product Manager"
author: Mirko Stocker (STX), Olaf Zimmermann (ZIO)
date: "03, 27, 2021"
copyright: Olaf Zimmermann, 2020-2021 (unless noted otherwise). All rights reserved.
license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License