API Our Organization
Kreisler Ng
Owner & President | Right at Home | I focus on improving the quality of life for seniors and adults with disabilities by providing in-home care that allows them to age with dignity and independence in their own homes.
API Mandate, 2002 by Jeff Bezos:
- All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
- Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
- There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
- It doesn't matter what technology they use.
- All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
- Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. (I heard this wasn't real though but you never know given his new look these days...)
As cPrime looks to scale itself we're constantly thinking about how-to API our organization not for today - but for the future. Who wants to live for the past or even today when you can build for the future! We're ideating internally through countless ways to structure communication paths to not only be effective but also be efficient in scaling and even de-scaling in order to address our clients ever-growing needs and more complex business problems.
It's not only about effectiveness, efficiency, and scaling but we're giving deep thoughts around:
- Future career paths and growth paths for our people
- How do we unlock intrinsic motivation of mastery, autonomy, and purpose for all
- Alignment of people and processes to not only on an individual-level but arguably more importantly common team-based goals and team-based incentives that align with our company's mission and strategy
- Continuous accelerated, learning feedback loops
- What collaboration and productivity tools do we need for all of our people given face-to-face may not be an option
- How do we de-couple and remove dependencies and function more like value streams and full-stack scrum teams while maintaining overall alignment? How do we stay loosely coupled though?
- People engagement and people communities
- What does leadership and management mean in our organization?
- How will this evolve as our culture evolves? Will it allow our culture to even organically evolve?
- How will this affect the way we hire?
- How does it align with some of our core values of: value, learning, teamwork, and ownership?
In a way, I'd like to think we want to build a platform organization for the future. A platform that can flex as we move where the marketplace moves. Regardless of geography, people, processes, tools, acquisitions and most importantly our quickly evolving culture.
Wait - is that Organization-as-a-Service (OaaS)? Or rather a people platform? Are we building that?!
We've pretty much killed most of email and pointless meetings (a lot of powerpoint too; Mr. Bezos would be proud) here. We live in a world of Slack, Jira / Trello, and Confluence. All built for teams and full collaboration.
I'm confident we'll iterate and figure out our platform for tomorrow. If not - I know we'll stay uncomfortable and keep transforming because we're not satisfied with the status quo.