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How do I get feedback from my API consumers?

person_raised_hand Developer Experience Updated August 12, 2026

Short answer

Ask them directly, make the channels visible and machine-readable, and — most importantly — visibly act on what you hear. A feedback loop where nothing ever changes stops receiving feedback.

Start by asking. It is remarkable how rarely providers simply email their top consumers and ask what is hard. The people integrating with you have a precise, unglamorous list of the things that annoy them, and most of them have never been asked.

Then make the channels visible and low-friction: a public issue tracker, a forum where answers are searchable, a documented email address that a human reads, and a way to request features that does not disappear into a void. Publish those channels in your APIs.json so they are machine-readable and catalogable, not just links on a page somebody has to find.

The part that determines whether any of it works is whether feedback visibly changes anything. Close the loop out loud: “you asked for this, here it is, here is the change log entry.” A loop where everything goes in and nothing comes out stops receiving input within a couple of cycles, and then you have the appearance of listening with none of the information.

One diagnostic worth sitting with: look at whose feedback actually moves your road map. That tells you who your organization really considers the customer — and it is frequently not the developers using the API.

Go deeper in the guidance

This answer is distilled from the API Evangelist guidance catalog — the long-form treatment of each topic, with its own citations back into sixteen years of writing.