Who is your API for? Applying user personas to build better dev platforms
summary
Argues that building personas and segmentation produces actionable tradeoffs not vague sympathy — at FreshBooks the team identifies three distinct dev types (owner-as-developer, developer-entrepreneur, SaaS partner) with different goals, risk tolerance and SDK/API needs, and at ecobee discovers adoption driven by utility buyers not individual coders. Uses slider-style attributes and outcomes (example goal: speed up dev velocity 3x) to prioritize features into focused roadmaps so work produces momentum instead of a scattered Jira backlog.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:10Who is your API for
- 6:01Why personas matter
- 9:33Creating useful personas
- 12:03Goal-oriented developer personas
- 15:56Multiple personas in APIs
- 19:25Internal vs public APIs
- 21:11FreshBooks API personas
- 25:27Prioritizing with personas
- 26:30Further reading
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