API Portal
Boosting Developer Velocity
Enhanced Kyivstar's API Portal with features, significantly boosting developer experience (DX). These improvements directly supported a 20% quarterly revenue increase from API products.
Challenge
After successfully launching the API Portal MVP that reduced onboarding from 6+ months to minutes, we faced new challenges as our user base grew:
- Limited Developer Tooling: Basic documentation wasn't enough for efficient API integration
- Lack of Usage Transparency: Business stakeholders needed better visibility into API consumption and costs
- Complex Integration Friction: Advanced use cases required more sophisticated support
- Revenue Growth Goals: The business needed to accelerate API product adoption and usage
My Strategic Approach
As Senior Product Designer, I focused on enhancing developer experience (DX) through targeted, high-impact features:
1. Interactive API Documentation & Testing
User Need: Developers were using external tools like Postman for testing, creating friction in their workflow.
Design Solution:
- Embedded "Send Request" functionality directly within documentation
- Real-time request/response visualization using users' own API keys
- Multi-language code snippets for instant implementation
- Syntax-highlighted response formatting with expandable nodes
Design Decision: I prioritized in-context testing over more comprehensive standalone tools, as our research showed context-switching was a major integration bottleneck.
2. Data-Driven Analytics Dashboard
User Need: Business stakeholders lacked visibility into API usage patterns and associated costs.
Design Solution:
- At-a-glance overview showing key metrics (calls, success rates, costs)
- Detailed API usage statistics with filtering by product, status codes, and time periods
- Visual trends and anomaly indicators for proactive issue identification
- Cost forecasting based on current usage patterns
Technical Consideration: I leveraged my front-end knowledge to design visualization components that balanced performance with information density.
3. Streamlined Webhook Management
User Need: Developers struggled to configure real-time event notifications crucial for reliable messaging.
Design Solution:
- Intuitive webhook configuration interface
- Real-time testing and validation of webhook endpoints
- Detailed delivery logs with error diagnostics
- Templated configurations for common integration patterns
Design Decision: I created a visual webhook flow diagram that helped technical and non-technical stakeholders understand the event flow, bridging communication gaps between teams.
Impact
The enhanced portal directly contributed to business growth and developer productivity:
- 20% Quarterly Revenue Growth for API products
- Integration Time Reduced from days/weeks to hours
- Developer Satisfaction Improvement with higher self-service rates
- Support Ticket Reduction for routine configuration tasks
Key Insights
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Developer Experience Drives Business Growth: Making developers successful is a direct path to increased product adoption and revenue.
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Strategic Feature Prioritization: By focusing on the highest-friction points in the developer journey (testing, monitoring, event handling), we delivered outsized impact with limited resources.
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Technical Background as Design Advantage: My front-end development experience enabled me to design solutions that balanced technical constraints with optimal user experience.
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Self-Service as Strategy: Empowering users with robust self-service capabilities not only reduced support costs but also increased user satisfaction and platform stickiness.
This evolution transformed the API Portal from a basic access point to a comprehensive developer success platform that directly contributed to business growth.