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Product API: how products communicate

Level: Senior
Time to complete: 30 minutes

A modern PM builds only what is needed, and for everything else, they ask a team to integrate with ready-made APIs (for example, payment gateways). To write good product requirements and understand the API offerings of other teams, you need to understand the API structure: endpoint, input, output, and errors. It's much easier than it seems - soon you will call the API yourself!

Mike
Lead Product Manager, mentor

I can go on explaining the theory for a long time, or you can immediately try it with your own hands - this way the concept will quickly turn into knowledge. I have an API for you that generates... memes! Just click the link (or what's the same thing - copy it into your browser) and you will see a (hilarious!) picture.

https://apimeme.com/meme?meme =Spiderman-Computer-Desk&top=Even%20Spiderman&bottom=studies%20at%20ProductDo

You immediately faced an important API concept - parameters (or key) and their values. This API has three parameters, which is all that the caller can control:

  • The meme parameter is responsible for the image. Currently, it is set to "Spiderman-Computer-Desk", but you can select your image here here and simply replace the title with new.
  • The top parameter is the text at the top of the meme; you can replace it, too.
  • The bottom parameter is the bottom text. Please note that the space must be represented by the special character %20; otherwise, the computer will “think” that you have finished typing, and we need to pass it the space.

Everything else (for example, the size of the picture) is decided for you by the service that this API provides; that is, this parameter cannot be changed.