Success metrics when launching your first developer portal.
Sovdeep Das is Fiserv’s Senior Director of product management, working on open finance platforms. In this article, Sovdeep discusses metrics that you can look at when launching your first portal.
Fiserv is uniquely positioned to drive innovation and differentiation in the market. Fiserv serves one in three US banks. We have 150 million deposit accounts. We have 100% touch points with US households and serve more than 26,000 branches.
We researched what customers, business owners, and peers are dealing with today within the business units across the organization. We also assessed what the customers deserve: a unified and consistent developer experience, easy discovery, and cell service integration and variants. Product teams deserve automation, governance, self-service, content management, and workflow management. This was the guiding principle for developing or creating division among developers.
Our team had a success criterion where they wanted to radically change the developer experience to provide untold levels of enjoyable productivity. This includes many unified assets and platforms where developers can play, build, deploy, monitor, monetize, build, and commune with Fiserv products. The team set a goal to build the world’s best developer portal experience.
Another success criterion is to see how we can onboard teams in less than one hour and become the go-to place for building FinTech apps. This was our goal, but we did not achieve it all.
The Developer Studio was built in nine months keeping these aspects and requirements in mind. Of course, building this required a lot of user research metrics and usage metrics, and we’re still iterating through them.
Some of the aspects that we used for user testing and interviews were layouts, interactions, microcopy feedback, and qualitative feedback. We added features to the API developer experience based on what we got.
Banking Hub: Open API Workspace
Our goal is that developers from financial institutions, fintechs, and other businesses have instant access to begin working with Fiserv core banking APIs in a shared test environment. We enabled a self-service instant automated API key, which gives the developer access to one of these shared test environments. Developers get a transactional API call to the backend systems, the whole round trip to understand the feasibility of their applications with Fiserv APIs. They can explore, integrate, publish, and launch. That’s the end-state goal of banking.
Our teams continue to work towards adding multiple products and platforms into the Developer Studio banking hub to allow developers to gain instant access to the APIs. In the future, using our open finance bank platforms will allow Fiserv’s products and services to provide a faster go-to-market integration with a growing market segment supporting our objectives to delight our clients and efficiently grow the business.
Banking Hub – Metrics that Matter
Documentation – understanding popular pages and user engagement time. We need to measure whether a user is engaging enough in a particular use case or document or is struggling with a particular page. These metrics help to define our priorities of documentation and upgrades.
APIs – understanding popular APIs, cores, and domains. These metrics drive us to build popular pages and recommendations for developers and users working on a proof of concept on their apps.
Workspace – We measure if developers have created free workspaces, if they have upgraded, or making API calls, etc.
General – What does the traffic rate look like?
To summarize, if anyone wants to create an API experience, listen to your instincts and start doing what is right and effective. Set your NorthStar and waypoints by understanding the pain points and the value of solving that problem. Solve the core problem by focusing on what problems you want to solve now and in the future. Test, iterate, and refine your product. Show quick results and repeat the process.
