Is the portal made to manage the complexity of consumably exposing a large API portfolio?
An excellent unified enterprise developer portal makes it possible to organize vast sets of integration information in a single platform portal, one that allows this enterprise to get observability across their API landscape. It is the antithesis of an uninvolved byzantine listing.
Once a company decides to fully manage and document their APIs, put emphasis on an API-first strategy, and streamline digital governance, they start looking for a developer portal that can support a unified developer experience. They might need to share certain documentation only with partners or customers, and styling needs to always be on-brand.
In this category, we are only looking for portals that were created to serve as a federated platform for the API portfolio of large and complex corporations (due to organic growth, mergers and acquisitions, or any number of other reasons). Portals that expose the corporation's extensive integration affordances in a unified way that makes it easier for users to form a mental model through one comprehensive system.
Award Criteria
Questions to ask:
- Is the portal made to expose a complicated, large API portfolio? Is this portfolio the result of combined enterprise units and alliances?
- Does the portal serve the user with some form of a domain model?
- Does the portal have a structure that clearly represents the vision on how the offerings are documented and why they are as such?
- Is there a smooth, unified user experience for the many integration interfaces? Is the customer journey cohesive with your brand, your offerings, and the desired outcome?
- How do you streamline integrations between various offerings?
- Is the portal supported by higher management? Is there long term maintenance and support ensured? How do you keep the portal sustainable?
- Is there any user feedback mechanism to inform new product development?
To allow the jurors to reasonably understand what architectural and business complexities the portal federates into one amazing end user experience, we ask that you give them a short explanation on this, as well as the short history, operational context and corporate purpose of the portal.
To relieve some of the pressure in this category, and as word of caution if you are working for such amazing results, we recommend reading an article just on the opposite.
