For teams who run an external developer portal
Portal PathCan an evaluator decide, and an engineer make a first call, before they give up?
Paste your external developer portal's navigation tree and the steps from landing to the first successful API call. Your browser classifies every page onto the top, solution and bottom layers for evaluators and engineers, checks that pricing and use cases read before login, holds the path to a time-to-first-call target set by your API's complexity, places every self-service surface, ranks the friction fixes and build vs buy, and groups the gaps into a Priority 1/2/3 roadmap. Then the redesigned navigation, and the planned path.
The portal as it is free
The interview - each answer moves a ladder free
The checks free
What the page flags
The roadmap, Priority 1/2/3
The navigation, classified
The path to first call today
Every surface and its home
The ladders
Area by area
Your checked tree free
Every page with its kind, layer, audience and access, then the roadmap - ready for the issue tracker.
Checked tree (Markdown)
The redesigned navigation metered
Pricing as soon as the session is ready...
Sign inThe reply could not be read. Here it is as it came back:
Caveats
Caveats
The page's check of this reply
Saved portals
How it works - and what is sourced
The checks follow the skill. Each page is classified to one kind by a fixed keyword table (pricing, use cases, catalog, reference, guides, quickstart, keys, logs, sandbox, usage, billing, changelog, status, errors, support, search, assistant, team, SDKs, samples, community, roadmap, home, other) and given a layer - top for landing, catalog and pricing; solution for use cases; bottom for the docs and the console - and an audience. Pricing or use cases behind a login wall is a sales-enablement failure; a missing solution layer, mandatory signup before exploration, keys that need a ticket and an unowned portal are the skill's failure modes and fail here. The surfaces needing a home are the skill's placement table plus usage, billing, changelog, support, search and the AI assistant.
The time-to-first-call target comes from the complexity class: under 15 minutes for a simple REST API with token auth, under 30 for top marks on Ably's rubric, under an hour for OAuth plus webhooks; Twilio's 5 minutes is shown as context only. A timed path passes at or under the target, needs a fix up to twice it, and fails beyond. The friction fixes run in the skill's efficiency order - ungated exploration, a ready-to-run collection, an auto-provisioned key, personalized onboarding - and move as the skill says: docs already open start one rung up, a stall between signup and first call puts the key first, several roles promote personalized onboarding, a hard deadline sends it last. Build vs buy defaults to a managed platform; compliance, business authors or a multi-gateway portfolio promote a custom build, a CMS authors love flips toward it, and it is never promoted without a named owner.
The maturity slide is this page's own rule, not Pronovix's: their scoring rubric is proprietary. A portal with no named owner, or with fewer than half its applicable checks passing, sits at project; one with an owner, no failing check and at least 85% passing sits at critical business infrastructure; the rest at product. Each check belongs to one of the six focus areas, an area's score is pass plus half of each fix over the checks that apply, and the roadmap puts every fail at Priority 1, every fix at Priority 2 and the nice-to-haves at Priority 3.