Each week, we share progress on our activities and thinking at Platformable.

This month, we did a ‘soft launch’ for our new survey of the month club. The idea is to invite feedback from anyone working with APIs on key themes we are looking at as part of our open ecosystem projects at Platformable. For this survey, we are offering a 200 Euro prize draw, and the winner will get a voucher to buy from Back Market or Wordery/Bookshop. One learning is that this hasn’t seemed to be enough of an incentive to encourage participation. Ideally, we will build up a community of respondents who share their feedback each time we run a survey (we have two more coming up in partnership with clients, as well as our continued monthly surveys). For future surveys, we will try offering more respondents smaller prizes (instead of one big prize). We also want repeat survey respondents to be rewarded, so complete three surveys for example, and you get a free subscription to our paid trends reports, or a book, like James Higginbotham’s new Principles of Web API Design. We will also be reaching out through our network to ask our contacts what kind of incentives would encourage them to regularly share their thoughts with us and what are the obstacles to regularly answering industry surveys.

How API Leaders Plan Identify new API Product Ideas and Features

Out of our first 16 survey respondents (predominantly working as API architects, developers and product managers), the majority draw on feature requests from current users to identify new product priorities.

We see this play out in open banking. For example, the open banking software Temenos, which recently launched a composable banking services platform to support banks and Banking as a Service providers, also has a user forum site, with a dedicated area where users can share their ideas for new API features:

Others might use strategies such as looking over support requests, noting ideas and feature requests that are raised when working directly with partners, or may have direct channels on their developer portals to allow users to make feature requests or vote up new product ideas described by the API provider. ABN AMRO, for example, started by including potential ideas in their API Catalogue and would wait to see if enough users requested the API product, which would then be moved to design and beta release stage. Since then, ABN AMRO’s API team has matured to create the “Open Banking Circle” as a mechanism to communicate with users about future product ideas:

Survey respondents could select multiple product ideation strategies, and the second most common was business managers identifying future product needs. Current API Product Manager job descriptions from Visa and Surepay, for example, both include product ideation as part of the role:

As we continue organising our Open Sustainability product ideation workshop to be held on 23 February, we will be sharing some best practices in how others are working through API product ideas, and how green fintech are coming up with ideas of what sustainability solutions to build with open banking/open finance APIs. Feel free to book a time on our Calendly if you would like to share your ideation strategies or to discuss how to participate in our workshops.

Here’s what the Platformable team has been working on the past two weeks:

Open Ecosystems

• Continued building a database of privacy technology tools and providers
• Prepared research for an API Security State of the Market Report and started building an API Security Landscape Tool to be launched at the API Secure conference on April 6 & 7
• Continued content development work with several of our clients
• Began preparations for a major industry survey we will be  collaborating on
• Refactored and updated our blog component code generator tool, with the help of our trainee Elmira Saifullina (Elmira is available for work! We highly recommend her for work as a full-time developer)

Open Banking/Open Finance

• Commenced research for our next two reports: one on architecture and tooling, and one on Banking as a Service offerings
• Continued building our API product monetization tool
• Published a guest post on our Open Banking/Open Finance Q1 2022 Trends Report
• Posted an article on Platformable about our Open Banking Trends Report 

Open Government

• Completed a major project with a client on their API strategy and API management technical architecture design
• Took on the administration role for the API4Gov LinkedIn group. We aim to increase posting in the community to share best practices we come across for government APIs

Open Health

• Presented at an Israel health policy data course, sharing research Mark Boyd collaborated on with the Open Data Institute’s team
• Continued work on data governance projects for our community health organisation clients
• Continued to add to our open health ecosystem database
• Worked with three community health organisations on their data governance and data management systems

Open Sustainability

• Submitted our views on how open ecosystems can support the European Union’s Open Energy Action Plan
• Prepared to speak at an event focused on the potential of using open banking APIs for sustainability, being hosted by Axway on 8 February:

Axway webinar, signup at: https://go2.axway.com/EMEA-EN-WBN-2022-02-08On24webinarOpenBankingwithCommerzbank_LP-AX-Registration.html

• Commenced drafting the content for our trends report looking at how open banking and open finance APIs can support sustainability efforts (to be launched on 15 February)
• Continued preparation for our product ideation workshop (to be held 23 February 2022)

Business Development

• Attended two retro sessions to discuss learnings from recent completed projects
• Held 3 new client meetings
• Responded to one academic open data research project (as an interviewee)
• Met with industry stakeholders on open health, banking, finance, business leadership and API events