Mapping the No-Code/Low-Code Ecosystem with Your API Strategy

In recent years, no-code/low-code has been trending to the point of approaching "buzzword" status. Consequently, with this growing trend comes potential failures within the space. A no-code/low-code strategy will fit within the strategies of most successful developer platforms over the next few years, but has important differences from other components of a comprehensive platform plan.

In this session, you’ll get a holistic overview of the no-code/low-code landscape, common personas, key learnings from success and failures in the industry, and tips to create a plan as part of your overall developer story.

Using Neuropsychology in Hiring: the Key to a Product Org's and Company's Success

In working at, consulting for, partnering with, and advising numerous startups, angel-funded to unicorn to post-IPO, I’ve observed numerous companies grow and crash, grow and succeed, or not grow at all. There are many ways a company can fail, and many factors that lead to a company’s success (including luck), but I’ve confirmed key traits in culture that are consistent among successful companies - hiring the right people.

Most companies claim to hire “smart people, no jerks” but few actually act on it. To truly execute well, one needs to understand what to really look for. With modern studies in neuropsychology (including entertaining studies of chimpanzees), we can now understand why hiring good people can be hard, and what we can do differently.

Let’s review a few of these modern studies and apply them to success and failure in the technology industry.

Hint: hiring diversity, empathy and “the right Type As” are key, but it’s easier said than done

Setting expectations with community members - tried and true methods

When managing a community of thousands of developers, with startups and enterprise partners, and a variety of industries, developer advocates encounter a mix of personalities and expectations. Some people are difficult to work with. Other times, you have to mend a relationship that was burned by another team. Al the while, you’re trying to maintain your company’s brand, and long-term relationships with developers.

Here are tried and true methods, psychology learnings, and tried and true (and reusable) message templates to ensure ongoing, positive relationships with community partners, while managing your own time and sanity.

Setting expectations with community members - tried and true methods

When managing a community of thousands of developers, with startups and enterprise partners, and a variety of industries, developer advocates encounter a mix of personalities and expectations. Some people are difficult to work with. Other times, you have to mend a relationship that was burned by another team. Al the while, you’re trying to maintain your company’s brand, and long-term relationships with developers.

Here are tried and true methods, psychology learnings, and reusable templates to ensure ongoing, positive relationships with community partners, while managing your own time and sanity.

Developing new tools for a better API Product and Developer Experience

As automated flows enable better APIs more easily, what else can we do by applying Design, Product, and Automation concepts to further improve this process?

From improving the OpenAPI Clients for API design to automating the connection between the designs and backends for smoother implementation, to providing more features for our developer experiences, let's see what can be done on top of the latest and greatest tools for the API Product Lifecycle, to make nextgen APIs even easier to build.

Interviewing PM Candidates: Moving away from a bad industry habit

Over the past 2 decades, interview methods for Product Managers evolved significantly. As we continue experimenting to find a truly accurate means of interviews, many tactics proven to have weak results have been dropped. Interestingly, with dramatic changes to the technology industry in recent years, resulting in both a surge of demand for PMs, and a surge in the supply, many companies unprepared for the new dynamics ended up with poor interview habits. Today, courses for PM interview training literally warn students that "being a good PM and interviewing for PM roles are not the same thing." It's time to re-assess our methods in this landscape, and in observing what we're doing wrong (and right), how to achieve a better process.

Here we'll share market data, learnings from many hiring managers over 5+ years, and learnings from PM interview courses to highlight quantitatively what is happening with our interviews.

Designing Embedded Platforms: Lessons from Industry Success & Failure

As popular web services extend their developer platforms for partners to integrate directly into their interfaces, design trends are forming from experiences in the world of embedded integrations. With Google Drive connecting tools like Balsamiq and ShiftEdit, Gmail enabling Docusign in their web and mobile UI, and Trello’s PowerUps, custom experiences powered by third parties are proving themselves to be a great way to improve one’s product and grow your business.

After analyzing over 15 years of experiments in this space, seeing past failures and current successes, we can identify what works from successful and unsuccessful platforms, what trends are working, and what UX and technical considerations are needed to launch your own successful embedded integration plan.

This talk relates to a series being published on Nordic APIs. I’ll just need PowerPoint or Google Slides to present.

Automating the API Product Lifecycle

Creating a successful API requires a proper process from concept and design, through development, and into ongoing maintenance and good developer support. There are many steps to a good API. As developer expectations for better-quality APIs increase, tools have made it easier to do this well. This was only possible with the rise of OpenAPI as a central schema upon which other tools could rely. Looking at the full API Product Lifecycle to design an API people will use, Jeremy Glassenberg will share the newest tools -- and potentially upcoming opportunities -- to better automate the planning and creation of a solid developer program with OpenAPI at the center.

API Design in Fintech: Challenges and Opportunities for next-gen APIs

After years of FinTech companies site-scraping bank websites, we’re finally seeing APIs. Plaid now lets you go to Chase bank directly, log in, and get secure, reliable, API access. And as those much needed APIs came, the industry now has several “decacorns” and a longer list of unicorns.

FinTech APIs came later than others, but experienced a growth spurt shocking even to the tech industry. And while we’ve seen well-designed APIs that adopted good standards already present, differences and inconsistencies between FinTech APIs show that these APIs aren’t at the quality they could be. FinTech API businesses are debating internally what standards and designs work best - formats, user representations, etc - all the while, ensuring security and privacy in APIs where stakes are higher.

We’ll highlight differences among successful APIs in the space to identify the open questions that lead to more solid standards for the FinTech space.

Automated APIs for Scaling Enterprises: How to Set Standards and Create Smooth API Implementations

API standards and schemas have helped to automate much of API design, implementation and maintenance -- and not a moment too soon. As many tech companies experienced growth spurts in the past year, they ended up with multiple teams working on new products and new APIs. Consequently, they learned that their ways to create well-designed APIs wouldn't work so easily when multiple teams have to create them.

Thanks to new solutions (centralized around a good API gateway), growing companies can establish a scalable system for designing, implementing and launching consistent APIs across many teams. We’ll share best practices and solutions from experiences with enterprises in this phase to understand how to be effective working across Product, Infrastructure and Engineering teams to do so.