Business alignment in the world of API integrations is essential—from both a producer and consumer perspective. The challenge is that there are different bubbles of business alignment that leaves people aligning towards the business goals which may not reflect their own long term business outcomes. Moving between the API producer and consumer perspective for so many years, as well as between startups and the enterprise, you realize that the phrase “business alignment” means different things to different people, and is something that is often manipulated and manufactured for competing reasons.
You hear technologists sharing stories in the API space which frames business alignment as being about simply finding API producers new consumers–that this aligns business needs (new consumers) with the technology needs (API integration). That API consumers finding and integrating with an API is the business of APIs, and successfully using any service or tool to accomplish equals business alignment. This is a very narrow view of the business of APIs put further by venture backed tooling makers, and is very much about aligning to outside or wider market business goals, and does not speak to aligning the API producer or API consumer business outcomes.
Significant divides exist between wider business and engineering groups within SMB, SME, and enterprise organizations. These gaps vary from industry to industry and across different sizes of organizations. Alignment between engineering groups who are producing APIs with business and product stakeholders who need to be aligned with consumers of APIs, and end-users of their applications—this is what I mean when I say “business alignment”. Engineering leadership have long been a captured audience by technology market forces, but often lack of alignment with wider engineering leadership incentives and product leadership interests—this is the biggest challenges we face today.
In short, business alignment means 1) alignment within a business between product, engineering, platform, sales, support, and compliance, 2) alignment outside a business with customers and partners, 3) alignment with market trends and forces, 4) alignment with developer and open-source ecosystems, 5) alignment with service providers, and 6) investor interests. I see too much business alignment being defined and driven by alignment with service providers, investors, and market over alignment internally within a business, and the prioritization of customer needs. Business alignment is one important concept at play in the API economy which means different things to different people and gets easily exploited because of intentional ambiguity.
