As a Platform or API Product Manager, you wear two hats.
You’re essentially twice the Product Manager.
• Once for your customers’ use cases: Just like any PM, you focus on solving the immediate needs of your direct customers.
• And once more for your customers’ customers’ use cases: You need to think beyond your customers to understand how their users will benefit from your product.
It’s not enough to address the problems you hear directly in the market. You have to enable your customers to solve problems for their customers.
Let’s break this down with an example: Sales Tax Calculation.
➡️ If you’re the PM for a Sales Tax app:
Your customers are likely merchants. They might use a UI to calculate the tax before sending an order. You’d talk to these users, observe their behavior, and use your product analytics to uncover needs and pain points.
➡️ But if you’re the PM for a Sales Tax API:
Your customers are developers, and their use cases can vary widely.
They could be:
• A billing company integrating your API into a checkout form.
• A solo developer building a mobile app to compare tax rates.
• A retailer selling appliances online.
• A software vendor developing an e-commerce plugin.Suddenly, your product is powering solutions you might never have imagined. The possibilities multiply. And so does your responsibility to understand those secondary use cases.
Here’s the hard truth: Saying, “I don’t know how people will use my API” leads to generic, hard-to-use, and ultimately unsuccessful API products.
By understanding both layers of use cases, you can build an API that truly delivers value—not just to your customers but to the entire ecosystem they serve.
So, double down on market outreach and customer conversations. This is how great API and Platform products succeed.
Do you agree? Let me know in the comments on the original LinkedIn post.