API First is really about people

Well, that’s a wrap. Just spent a great couple of days talking about API First strategies with a bunch of very smart people who know the challenge of changing hearts, minds, processes, toolchains, and design standards in an effort to be API First. While the benefits of this strategy are enormous, it’s a long sometimes torturous journey and it was great to be surrounded by people who have lived through, or are living through, the struggle.

Many thanks to Postman for hosting such a great gathering. The most striking part of the last couple of weeks was how very human-centric it was. We started with a moment of silence for the shooting victims in Texas and the room was visibly moved. That set the tone that this summit was going to be more about people than technology, and indeed it was.

With only 50 attendees, we had lots of time and opportunity to connect with each other, over meals, during walks, in our breakout sessions. More than once, people uttered the words that were in my head: “These are my people.” Without exception, the conversations always centered on our API journey and our technology responsibilities at our various companies, even when we were theoretically “off the clock”. ?I was really delighted to represent BetterCloud in those conversations and to be reminded of how brave and dedicated our engineering teams are.

I have some key takeaways from the discussions and the presentations that I thought I would share here.

1. Measuring engineering squad effectiveness by customer success scores means the engineering teams not only keep the customer top of mind but also aligns them with the rest of the business who are focused on the same outcomes. Abhinav Asthana talked about the difference this has made to Postman and the way the teams think about their customers’ needs.

2. Developer experience at your company is improved by providing guardrails with enough “optionality” inside those rails to let people work in ways that are most comfortable to them. We talked as a group about how to provide “paved roads” for developers that let them make choices about how to accomplish their goals while traveling on easy-to-navigate and easy-to-traverse pathways. Words of wisdom: “Optionality trumps consistency.”

3. In talking about API versioning, some great ideas surfaced that not only set expectations for the various states and versions of your API, but also encourages people to move to newer versions. One great idea for a public API is to charge more for use of the older versions so people are incentivized to move to the later versions (this won’t work for internal APIs, but the concept can probably be modified for that purpose). And including the “state” of your API in its description will set the right expectations with consumers (“trial, current, phasing out, deprecated”, for example).

4. More great words of wisdom for API providers (and engineering management too): “Stay out of the way.” ?? Ok, the context was to provide API capabilities then let the innovation happen. Consumers will do unexpected (and potentially wonderful) things with your API so don’t be too proscriptive. Make it easy to use, easy to authenticate into, secure it, then let your consumers innovate at will. Later we talked about using your APM to detect usage patterns and learn what they are really doing and whether they are stitching together common paths across your APIs. If you see some trends like this, you can reconsider how you are creating your endpoint collections and whether you should redesign your current APIs to meet the consumers where they are.

5. We heard from Jay Simons, former CEO of Atlassian, about Atlassian’s transition to an API First company and how they had to modify the organization to make that happen. Creating a centralized platform engineering squad alleviate the need to multiple teams to build the same services. He also talked about the challenges of having an organization learn while they are undergoing change… and we all nodded, groaned, laughed. It was a room full of sympathizers and that was part of the magic. We all understand each other’s journey and also how hard it is to travel this path.

6. Some final “words of wisdom” that really resonate with me… Ankit Sobti led us through Postman’s technical journey toward API First but I have to say that even that discussion, while anchored on technology, focused on people. He talked about Postman’s move to focus the teams on the problem they were trying to solve, not the solution. Solutions are temporary – some work, some don’t, some work for a period of time but don’t scale… keeping the focus on the problem you’re trying to solve puts you more into an iterative, continuous improvement mindset. And then the quote we all need to put on tee shirts: “The tool for collaboration is the API itself.”

I’ve been talking about APIs endlessly for over a decade, but I was happy to learn new things the last couple of days and also to be with a group of like-minded leaders who understand that APIs are as much ?a solution to a people problem as they are a solution to a technology problem.