Getting teams producing APIs to care about APIs is an equally daunting task of getting business leadership to care about and invest in APIs. This post overlaps heavily with my thoughts on what actually matters to API leadership, as these apply to leadership as well, but is primarily focused on the middle and lower levels of the enterprise. I would love for everyone to care about doing APIs well, but in my experience, the people who truly care about APIs will always be less than 5% of the people you talk to who work within the enterprise delivering APIs. Everyone else will have a wide mix of perspective, opinions, and levels of awareness that you will have to navigate if you expect to move the API conversation forward at scale within an enterprise.
Similar to my storytelling directly at business leadership, I want to be pragmatic about what teams who are producing APIs want from their work. I do not want to keep fantasizing that everyone loves their job and is super eager to learn more about APIs—those people exist, but here are the reasons I am thinking about how I can connect the API dots for the incentivization of teams who are building APIs.
- Getting a Job
- Keeping a Job
Beyond just having a job, like business leadership, teams are going to be paycheck based, and I am going to need to understand how to sensibly link up incentives across the API lifecycle directly to how much a team is paid to do the work they are doing.
- Their Paycheck
- Increasing Paycheck
Now we are starting to move towards how we can capture the technical and problem solving interests of teams, speaking to what actually interests them when it comes to their work, and better understanding what is rewarding to them when it comes to producing APIs.
- What Interests Them
- What is Rewarding to Them
Then I will move into the realm of career development and team collaboration. I don’t always think we can count on the team who are producing APIs to have a clear career plan or feel warm and fuzzy about collaborating with their team, but I do think this is a worthwhile area to explore before I move on to others.
- Helps Build Career
- Benefits Their Team
Like with leadership I have other ideas I want to explore, but I want to be honest and direct when I speak to teams producing APIs about the benefits to the business around them, while also speaking directly to what motivates them. The big question for me is how do we link these up to specific policies and rules across the API lifecycle. Things like API operation summaries and descriptions, change log updates, road map entries, and the other things that will enrich API contracts. That won’t be easy. This is one area I will be crafting questions for my API Evangelist Conversations, to better connect the dots between what actually matters to API teams and the API policies we are applying across the API lifecycle.
I am less confident with how to incentivize teams producing APIs to care about API than I am in convincing business leadership to care about APIs. This is why I am dedicating my API Evangelist Conversations podcast towards API producers and consumers over API service providers. I have a lot of ideas on how to incentivize teams to do the right thing and learn about best practices, but I need more hard evidence and connecting of the dots to the strategies and policies I am preaching to leadership. I suspect both areas will come down to business reasons over any technical one, but I want to make sure I am exploring all the different ways I can get teams producing APIs to take pride in their work.
