---
published: true
layout: post
title: API Products are Fantasy
date: 2025-04-30T09:00:00.000Z
tags:
  - Products
  - Feedback Loops
  - Customers
image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/algorotoscope-master/yellow-journalism-dinosaur-walking-desert.jpg
---
I’ve long been a proponent of treating your APIs as a product. I still believe in all the moving parts of what we collectively believe to be an API product, things like customer centricity, bridging product and engineering, feedback loops, and all that, but I am finding myself increasingly realizing that it is all a fantasy. APIs are invisible abstract things, and something that is difficult for technical people to properly see, let alone non-technical people, and with the rolling waves of startups hustling their API product fantasy, I think the fantasy is wearing thin.

Enterprise leadership I’ve worked with over the years used to talk about legacy API gateway migration, with IBM, Tibco, and others being the legacy, and now I am hearing the same when it comes to doing the work to migrate off Apigee. I heard a customer say the other day, “if Apigee gateway did half the things Apigee promised that it did, we’d be in a really good place”. Now don’t get me wrong, the Apigee gateway did a good job leading the API charge of the years, but I’d say the most memorable aspect of this was their championing of the concept of an API product.

Now, I believe there are two main reasons that API products are a fantasy, with 1) business people just don’t care about APIs that much, sorry, and 2) the overpromising and underdelivering of startups (not just Apigee) around helping enterprises actually craft API product has left the curtain open on the API hustle. If startups had actually worked together to define some standards about what an API product is and does rather than their ad hoc implementations with a hub, marketplace, or product catalog on top of it, things likely would be different. But, startups are all super smart special snowflakes that have to go at this alone.

Many of the capabilities in an API product managers toolbox will still be relevant going forward, but if you are honest with yourself, and you actually have any customers in mainstream enterprises you’ll know-—people could care less about your definition of an API product and doing APIs well. The separation between business and IT exists for a reason, to reduce the accountability of business people for technical complexity, and reduce the accountability of engineering for short-sighted business decisions. I get that in a perfect world, what we’ve been selling as an API product makes a lot of sense, but pick your head up, look outside beyond the bubble-—is the world you see logical and interested in doing the right thing?