What are the usual pain points of developer portals that so many teams struggle with?
Which improvements should you prioritize in your budget? What are the common objections and challenges to navigate when you rally for more investment in the developer portal?
In this article, we will map out some of the typical developer portal pain points, which can serve as a mental model that helps you shape stakeholder expectations and plan your investments in lockstep with your evolving API strategy.
Diagnose the real pain points
You know the portal could be much better than it is right now. But where to start? Can you diagnose what is missing? How do you triage the existing frustrations?
Lack of unified documentation
Because of the origin of API development in organizations that are not digital native, it is the reality that documentation is scattered across many owners and formats. This fragmentation makes it difficult for developers to find and confirm the necessary information. They either leave altogether for a better platform or find non-optimal workarounds.
This fragmentation can lead to confusion, mistakes, and delays. Businesses will always value streamlined processes that save money on developer time. The first order of improvement is findability and consistent docs.
If you lack dedicated techwriting specialists, Pronovix offers tailored technical documentation audit and writing services.
Hindered API access
Poor API access leads to frustration and ultimately discourages developers from seeking the API they are looking for. It is only a matter of time before they go to your competitors unless there is an even worse experience. When you burden the API integration with cumbersome onboarding or outdated documentation, people will likely take their business elsewhere.
Onboarding is the current focus area of many API portal teams, and expectations for a delightful user experience are becoming the norm. Onboarding also involves your very senior and highly paid colleagues who must request and approve access and troubleshoot when things go wrong. The closer you can wire the onboarding process and necessary authentication to your value-providing business processes, the better. Move along two steps on operational excellence and developer experience!
Poor user experience
A developer portal with low UX maturity can be a significant barrier to engagement. If the portal is difficult to navigate, slow to load, visually unappealing, or even inaccessible, expect high churn. UX is a field of expertise, and there is rapid progress in professionally understanding the minutiae of developer experience. This is typically the area that you want to avoid bootstrap with a thinly spread team in-house.
A well-informed UX audit and a clear execution plan for eliminating pain points methodically and systematically is the only approach worth it in the long run. Do you foresee your API integrations as part of your business infrastructure? (Yes, you do.) Then, you need a systematic playbook on user experience that will cater to scaling in all areas.
At Pronovix, we always advocate for bringing all key stakeholders to the table for such a playbook. Businesses often have uncharted and overlooked UX needs: developers are not the only developer portal users. Evolving developer portals can also benefit from interviewing their users, as stakeholder assumptions and plans are only sometimes current with the experienced reality of their end users.
We help to meet your developer portal users’ needs and improve developer experience, and increase value for your users and drive business growth.
Need Marketing on board
In an enterprise-grade public API program, no amount of adjustment can make up for missing out on the powers of your marketing team. A developer portal covers the whole range, from backend system integrations to direct user experience design. Bring your marketing team (and their budgets) on board and align on SEO, value proposition, use cases, and analytics.
Your APIs, which are fundamental business integrations, also need syncing to market needs and expectations. Getting a marketing investment budget is a topic for other articles, but it is a sign of the maturity of your API program. If you are at this point, do not turn back.
Is API adoption your KPI?
API adoption is a crucial metric if you run a public developer program. Lower-than-expected adoption growth rates can indicate that developers cannot find, understand, try out, or integrate your APIs effectively. If adoption rates are lagging, time for a checkup.
To make a compelling case for an investment, first, understand and prioritize your iterative steps toward an improved developer portal. If you can address the issues head-on and methodically, you can forestall more significant systemic issues.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Marcus Aurelius
Kristof Van Tomme will highlight why one needs a flexibly evolving developer portal, what the priorities should be, and how one can increase value.
The benefits of action
Any known and understood pain point–operational or otherwise–can be turned into an actionable step.
Instead of considering your developer portal as a reference docs depository with key provisioning, open up to all it can do for you. What we see as specialist consultants over and over, is the imperative to keep up with your corporate API strategy and stakeholders, and focus on reaching each goal that the developer portal can serve. It's much more than you think at this point, probably. Getting AI-ready is only the thin top layer shining only if build on top of a robust and well-maintained base.
The most commonly stated goals for a developer portal are as follows:
- Streamlined onboarding: provides developers with clear and comprehensive guidance to get started with your APIs, eases into role-based access control and terms of use.
- Centralized documentation: consolidates all existing documentation onto a single, well-organized platform, a prerequisite for a frictionless user experience and federated API management.
- Automation: enhance process efficiency and security, keep your focus on your expertise.
- Increased developer satisfaction: a faster integration journey and easy maintenance also depend on all relevant information being correct, readily available, and accessible.
- Elevated revenue stream: a robust, well-designed developer portal can open up new opportunities for the monetization of integration solutions or elevate an existing revenue stream by boosting API adoption.
- Assist and Expand: by offering workflow support and narrative content, you can assist with API bundle integrations and other integration solutions.
You can also reread the list above as the potential costs of inaction. If you delay working on the portal, you will not reach these goals, which you can consider your ongoing loss.
Common objections and concerns
You have identified the imminent pain points, and your team is resolute on the reachable benefits of resolving these issues. But leadership may still have lingering doubts and objections before they approved your budget for developer portal improvements. Let's address the Cost, Time, and Effort your planned reform will take so you can challenge these obstacles as your terrain.
Cost
You question the investment costs of significant changes to the developer portal, especially if the current setup seems to be working well enough. But what is the price of doing nothing?
The initial investment for a game-changer move, for example, rolling out a unified enterprise API portal to replace your fragmented landscape, might be significant. It is, however, the keystone for any sustainable and scalable integration upgrades and federated API management.
Consider change if it allows better-than-current collaboration with contributors, faster shipping on improvements, or a significant user experience elevation. However, sometimes, what you urgently need is significantly better content. As a strategic consultancy, we can also help you determine if it's the platform or the content you should worry about first.
Time
It takes time to progressively improve the performance of a large developer portal, which currently has low UX maturity and misses complex features. Start with what has the most significant and immediate impact on the user experience for those integrations that already provide value for the business. They could be your internal business users!
Release upgraded content faster and more regularly, and go for perfection second. Favor streamlining the proper business value drivers, not the current trends: your corporation may or may not be ready for the latest gimmicks. Maintaining less but well-written and organized documentation will be less time-consuming than duct tape and chewing gum holding notions together.
Effort
Another area of concern is the effort needed to maintain a more mature portal consistently. The complexity of an enterprise interface strategy does not get lost, but you can make it more explorable and manageable. Everyone wants discoverable, findable, and accurate information fast.
It is essential to admit that unresolved systemic issues will cause ongoing frustration, not to mention the unexpected cost and effect of putting out the emergent fires that you could have prevented. You must look at the maintenance cost of business infrastructure in collaboration with what its existence resolves in the first place. Invest in a developer portal in mind with the streamlining and governing constraint you need it to be.
Summary
A mature developer portal also serves to
- speed up onboarding,
- reduce support requests,
- automate recurring tasks,
- manage fine-tuned autonomy for all contributors and
- offer self-service to integrators (Yes, including AI).
Over time, a robust portal allows your teams to focus on their strategically important work, balancing out the initial investment of system creation.
We can help you address the complexity and get your developer portal to the maturity level your business processes need.
All Pronovix publications are the fruit of a team effort, enabled by the research and collective knowledge of the entire Pronovix team. Our ideas and experiences are greatly shaped by our clients and the communities we participate in.
