![]() ![]() The purpose of this paper is to use a real-world ecosystem example to demonstrate the subtle complexities of ecosystem design as well as to demonstrate how APIs (with the right ecosystem) are like opportunity multiplexers for businesses. Most people don't know what an ecosystem is, much less how to design one. They start by first establishing business objectives and priorities, conceptualizing the end-to-end customer experiences and business moments needed to support those objectives, and then they organize the necessary ecosystem - including the APIs - to launch the vision. Instead of putting the proverbial cart before the horse, the companies that have done best in the API economy are the ones that save the API details for later. At least not in the droves that you were hoping for. Unfortunately, unlike the mythical baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, if you just go ahead and build it, they (the consumers of your API) are not likely to come. In this follow up, we're revisiting Intuit as our test case and taking that visualization standard to a new level (version 2.0?) where we get into the details of what a successful API ecosystem looks like and how you should go about building yours.Ĭontrary to popular belief, succeeding in the API economy is not as simple as creating an API, tying it to a business model (eg: $ API calls), making the API publicly available on the Internet, and waiting for the money to roll in. Especially for the benefit of those hoping to learn from the successes of others. Believing that Intuit's journey could be truly instructional to other organizations hoping to join the API economy (and as can be seen from the illustrations in that article), we were inspired to artfully diagram the Quickbooks ecosystem in a way that accurately captured those subtleties.Īfter our initial attempt, we realized how these visualizations could not only serve as a valuable tool, we imagined that we could set a standard for how any organization's ecosystem could be captured, visualized and explained. ![]() It demonstrated the importance of putting end-to-end customer experiences and holistic platform thinking way ahead of the premature question "What should our API strategy be?" In the course of interviewing the head of the company's developer group Alex Barnett, we learned about the subtleties that make successful ecosystems tick. Once the request has been finalized and saved, Postman allows developers to generate snippets of code in their preferred language or framework to use in their own applications.How Intuit Designed its API Ecosystem For Both Internal and External SuccessĮditor's Note: In December 2018, ProgrammableWeb published a case study involving Intuit's Quickbooks ecosystem. Once they import the OAuth token, they can experiment with the QuickBooks Online API and configure their requests. Postman's code generation feature is used heavily at these kinds of events.ĭevelopers click the Run in Postman button to launch the Intuit QuickBooks collection in the Postman app. Intuit frequently helps developers explore and implement their API endpoints at hackathons and other workshops. Manas Mukherjee, Staff Software Engineer, Intuit Quickstart with code snippets Building an integration still takes some time, but onboarding using proper OAuth tokens has become super quick. For example, once you generate an OAuth 2.0 access token and refresh token using Postman, you can then call the QuickBooks Online APIs and access your sandbox account using your generated token. Postman has a set of helpers to deal with authentication protocols easily. The OAuth specification is a complicated one, and there are many variations. Patty Hair, Staff Technical Writer, Intuit OAuth authentication protocols ![]() Postman Collections are the most concise format to get the information in a spot where they're expecting it to find it. Developers don't want to read a lot of stuff. Once they're ready to move on, developers can update the environment with their own authentication credentials and save them in a Postman environment template to then switch over to accessing their own development environment.ĭocumenting and sharing the collection has reduced the number of support tickets submitted by developers getting started with the Intuit API endpoints. The requests in the collection are initially configured to access the sandbox development environment for an immediate working prototype. The Run in Postman button is an easy way to share a Postman Collection for the QuickBooks Online APIs. ![]()
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