Hiring product managers for API-focused roles requires a different lens than traditional product management recruitment. As SaaS companies increasingly build platform businesses where APIs serve as the primary product interface, the ability to think API-first becomes essential. Yet many hiring teams struggle to effectively assess this specialised mindset during interviews. This guide will help you identify and evaluate true API-first product thinking in PM candidates, ensuring you bring on board professionals who can drive your platform strategy forward.
What is API-first product thinking in product management
API-first product thinking represents a fundamental shift in how product managers approach building software. Rather than treating APIs as technical afterthoughts or integration layers, this mindset positions them as the core product experience. Product managers with this approach design the API before building the user interface, considering developers as primary users.
This differs significantly from traditional product thinking, where user interfaces and end-user experiences take precedence. In API-first thinking, platform extensibility becomes the foundation. Every product decision considers how third parties might integrate, extend, or build upon your platform.
For SaaS companies, this matters enormously. Companies like Stripe, Twilio, and Shopify have demonstrated that API-first approaches can create massive network effects. When your product becomes a platform that others build upon, you multiply your reach and value without proportionally increasing your development costs.
The core principles of API-first product thinking include:
- Developer experience parity: Treating developer experience with the same rigour as end-user experience, recognising that developers are your primary customers with unique needs around reliability, predictability, and technical precision
- Documentation as product: Building comprehensive documentation as a core product feature rather than an afterthought, ensuring developers can successfully integrate without extensive support
- Versioning and compatibility: Thinking about API versioning and backwards compatibility from day one to protect existing integrations while enabling innovation
- Composability mindset: Considering how partners and customers will compose your services with others to solve problems you haven’t even imagined yet, maximising platform flexibility
These principles work together to create a product philosophy where the API becomes the foundation for ecosystem growth. Rather than limiting your product to what your team can build, API-first thinking enables countless developers to extend your platform’s capabilities, creating value that scales far beyond your direct development efforts. This approach transforms your product from a standalone solution into a platform that powers innovation across your entire customer base.
Key indicators of API-first mindset in PM candidates
When evaluating PM candidates for API-focused roles, certain signals reveal their true capability. Strong candidates naturally discuss developer personas alongside traditional user types. They understand that developers have distinct needs around documentation, error handling, and predictability.
Listen for how candidates describe past product decisions. Those with genuine API-first thinking will explain choices through an integration lens. They’ll mention considerations like webhook reliability, rate limiting strategies, or how they balanced feature richness against API simplicity.
Watch for these green flags that indicate strong API-first thinking:
- API economics fluency: Candidates can articulate API call volume considerations, pricing models for different usage tiers, and the relationship between developer adoption and activation metrics
- Platform strategy clarity: They naturally explain how they’ve thought about which capabilities to expose versus keep internal, demonstrating understanding of platform boundaries
- Developer community engagement: They share specific examples of engaging with developer communities, gathering feedback, and incorporating developer insights into product decisions
- Integration-first decision making: They frame past product choices through how they impact integrations, discussing trade-offs between developer flexibility and platform stability
Conversely, be alert to these red flags that suggest limited API-first capability:
- APIs as technical details: Treating APIs purely as implementation concerns rather than core product experiences worthy of strategic attention
- Limited external API experience: Only working on internal APIs without facing the challenges of external developer needs and public documentation
- Inability to discuss trade-offs: Cannot articulate the tensions between developer flexibility, platform stability, and business requirements
- Missing developer empathy: Lack of understanding about developer workflows, pain points, or what makes APIs delightful versus frustrating to use
These indicators work together to paint a picture of a candidate’s true capabilities. While any single green flag might appear in candidates without deep API-first thinking, a pattern of consistently demonstrating these qualities—particularly when discussing specific past experiences—reveals genuine expertise. Similarly, one red flag might be explainable, but multiple red flags suggest a candidate who may struggle with the unique demands of API product management despite strong general PM skills.
Proven interview questions to assess API-first product thinking
Effective assessment requires targeted questions that go beyond generic product management queries. These questions should reveal how candidates think about APIs as products, balance competing priorities, and demonstrate empathy for developer users.
For assessing prioritisation and developer empathy, ask: “Walk me through how you’d prioritise between adding a new endpoint versus improving documentation for existing ones.” Strong answers will consider developer friction, support burden, and adoption metrics rather than just feature counts. Look for candidates who discuss the compound value of great documentation and understand that poor documentation can render even powerful features unusable.
To evaluate technical understanding and developer empathy, try: “How would you approach versioning when you need to make a breaking change to a widely-used endpoint?” The best responses demonstrate empathy for developers’ integration maintenance burden and knowledge of deprecation strategies, including sufficient notice periods, migration guides, and potentially maintaining parallel versions.
For strategic thinking assessment, pose this scenario: “A major customer wants a custom endpoint that doesn’t fit your API design philosophy. How do you handle this?” Strong candidates balance customer needs against platform coherence and long-term maintainability, perhaps discussing alternatives like custom parameters, webhooks, or partner-specific solutions that don’t compromise the core API.
Additional questions to explore different dimensions:
- Ecosystem thinking: “How would you decide whether to build a feature internally or enable it through third-party integrations?” This reveals understanding of platform strategy and ecosystem development
- Metrics and measurement: “What metrics would you track to understand API product health?” Look for answers beyond simple call volume, including error rates, time-to-first-successful-call, and developer retention
- Developer experience: “Describe a time you improved developer experience without adding new features.” This identifies candidates who understand that API product work extends beyond capabilities to include documentation, error messages, and onboarding
Calibrate difficulty and focus based on seniority. For senior roles, explore questions about API monetisation strategy, building developer ecosystems from scratch, or making architectural decisions that balance current needs with future flexibility. For mid-level PMs, focus on execution challenges around documentation quality, error handling patterns, and developer onboarding flows. For junior roles, emphasise understanding of developer needs and ability to translate technical requirements into product decisions.
Practical evaluation frameworks for API-focused PM roles
Create a competency matrix that scores candidates across key dimensions: technical API knowledge, platform strategy thinking, developer empathy, and ecosystem building capability. Weight these based on your specific role requirements. For example, a PM launching a new API platform needs stronger ecosystem building skills, while one optimising an existing API requires deeper technical knowledge and developer empathy.
Case study evaluations work particularly well for API-focused roles. Present candidates with a real API design challenge, such as designing a rate limiting system or planning an API migration. Evaluate not just their solution but their process for gathering requirements from developer users and considering edge cases. Strong candidates will ask clarifying questions about existing integrations, developer segments, and business constraints before proposing solutions.
Take-home assignments should mirror actual work:
- Documentation review: Ask candidates to review API documentation and suggest improvements, revealing their practical understanding of what makes documentation effective for developers
- API specification design: Request an API specification for a specific use case, assessing their ability to design intuitive, consistent, and extensible interfaces
- Developer feedback analysis: Provide sample developer feedback or support tickets and ask how they’d prioritise and address the issues, testing their ability to extract patterns and make strategic decisions
- Migration planning: Present a scenario requiring a breaking change and ask for a migration plan, evaluating their understanding of deprecation strategies and developer communication
Reference checks should include specific questions about the candidate’s API product experience. Ask previous managers: “How did they balance developer needs against business requirements?” or “Can you describe a situation where they made a difficult API design decision?” Also inquire about their collaboration with engineering teams and their ability to advocate for developer experience.
Involve technical evaluators, particularly developer advocates or senior engineers who work closely with external developers. They can assess whether candidates truly understand developer workflows and pain points. These evaluators bring credibility to the assessment by identifying candidates who speak authentically about developer needs versus those who use the right terminology without deep understanding.
These frameworks work best when combined into a comprehensive evaluation process. The competency matrix provides structure for comparing candidates objectively, while case studies and take-home assignments reveal practical capabilities. Reference checks validate past performance, and technical evaluator involvement ensures you’re assessing genuine API-first thinking rather than surface-level familiarity. Together, these approaches create multiple data points that help you confidently identify candidates who can excel in API product roles.
Common assessment mistakes in evaluating API product thinking
Many companies over-emphasise technical knowledge at the expense of strategic thinking. A candidate who can discuss REST versus GraphQL architectures but can’t explain how to build developer communities will struggle in API product roles. The mindset matters more than the technical trivia. While technical literacy is necessary, the ability to think strategically about platforms, ecosystems, and developer needs separates great API product managers from technically knowledgeable individuals.
Another frequent error is failing to distinguish between API experience and API-first mindset. Someone who’s managed products with APIs isn’t necessarily someone who thinks API-first. Probe deeper into their actual decision-making process and priorities. Did they treat the API as a feature or as the product? Did they make decisions with developer experience as a primary consideration or as an afterthought?
Additional pitfalls that undermine effective assessment include:
- Generic interview questions: Using standard product management questions about consumer app features or enterprise sales cycles that don’t reveal API product thinking or platform strategy capabilities
- Overlooking cultural fit: Ignoring whether candidates have comfort with technical audiences, patience for detailed documentation work, and appreciation for developer culture—all essential for success in API-focused roles
- Insufficient technical involvement: Conducting interviews without input from engineers or developer advocates who can identify authentic understanding versus rehearsed responses
- Focusing on outputs over process: Evaluating what candidates built rather than how they made decisions, missing insights into their actual thinking and prioritisation approaches
- Neglecting ecosystem thinking: Failing to assess whether candidates understand platform dynamics, network effects, and how to enable rather than control innovation
The best practice is creating a structured evaluation process specifically designed for API-focused PM roles, involving the right evaluators, and being willing to pass on candidates with strong general PM skills but weak API-first thinking. This requires discipline—particularly when facing hiring pressure—but compromising on API-first capabilities leads to product decisions that treat APIs as afterthoughts rather than core experiences. By maintaining high standards specific to API product management, you ensure your platform strategy receives the specialised leadership it requires, ultimately building stronger developer relationships and more successful platform businesses.
Finding product managers who truly understand API-first thinking takes effort, but the investment pays off in better platform decisions and stronger developer relationships. By applying these assessment approaches, you’ll improve your ability to identify candidates who can drive your API product strategy forward. If you’re building your SaaS product team and need support finding PM candidates with genuine API-first capabilities, we’re here to help you navigate this specialised corner of product management recruitment.
