developing a product vision, beginning

src/en/drafts/04-Section III. The API Product/03.md

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+### Developing a Product Vision
+
+The above-mentioned fragmentation of the API target audience, e.g. the ‘developers — business — end users’ triad, makes API product management quite a non-trivial problem. Yes, the basics are the same: find you auditory's needs and satisfy them; the problem is you product has several different auditories, and their interests sometimes diverge. The end users demand for an affordable cup of coffee does not automatically imply business demand for a coffee machine API.
+
+Generally speaking, the API product vision must include the same three elements:
+  * grasping how end users would like to have their problems solved;
+  * projecting how business would solve those problems if appropriate tools existed;
+  * understanding what technical solutions might exist and where lie the boundaries of their applicability.
+
+On different markets and in different situations, the ‘weight’ of each element differs. If you're creating an API-first product for developers with no UI components, you might the skip end users problems analysis; and by contrast, if you're providing an API to extremely valuable functionality and you hold a close-to-monopolistic position on the market, you might actually never care about how developers love your software architecture or how convenient your interfaces are for them, as they simply have no other choice.
+
+In the majority of cases we still have to deal with two-step heuristics based on either technical capabilities or business demands:
+  * you might first form the vision how you might help business owners given the technical capabilities you have (heuristics step one); then, the general vision how your API will be used to satisfy end users' needs (heuristics step two);
+  * or, given your understanding of business owners' probleblems, you might make one heuristical ‘step right’ to outline future functionality for end users and one ‘step left’ to evaluate possible technical solutions.