API development must be a collaborative effort across product, engineering, and operations teams, with shared workspaces, design reviews, and cross-functional feedback loops that ensure APIs reflect both business requirements and technical best practices.
API Development Is Collaborative Across Teams
Policies
Review & Approval (Governance)
Require that every API design and significant change passes through a documented review and approval step before it ships, with clear owners and clear criteria. I am a big believer in design-first ...
Teams
Requiring at least one product and one engineering, as well as other potential stakeholders involved through the API lifecycle from define to production, ensuring there is always someone actively o...
Maintainers
Require that every API names its maintainers, the real people or team accountable for its design, operation, and support, and records them where the contract lives. I care about this from the very ...
GitHub Organizations
A GitHub organization provides a dedicated workspaces for teams to produce APIs, organize all the API contracts in motion, and leverage source countrol, CI/CD, teams, and other resources provided b...
GitHub Organization Teams
GitHub organizations allow for the management of people and teams to help define who has access to repositories, contracts, and other assets managed via this dedicated domain workspace.
GitHub Organization Repositories
GitHub organizations provide teams with the ability to create repositories for managing API contracts, separating and organizing contracts by meaningful bounded contexts within a specific domain.
Postman Workspace
A Postman Workspace provides a dedicated space to manage API contracts within a domain, complimenting other types of workspaces, allowing for private, partner, and public workspaces to exist for ma...
Feedback
Providing feedback on the business and technical details of each API contract, helping facilitate feedback from consumers and other stakeholders, but also from the learnings across other private an...
Questions
Empowering teams to ask questions via issue or discussion via Git repository, or directly via email about the API lifecycle, governance, as well as the business or technical elements of producing a...
Experiences
Collaboration
APIs are a team sport, and collaboration is the experience of many people working together to produce and consume them. Designers, developers, product owners, technical writers, and consumers all t...
Alignment
Achieving alignment between teams producing APIs and their consumers is a persistent challenge in API operations. Effective collaboration between business and technical stakeholders requires ongoin...
Communication
Consistent communication about the production and consumption of APIs is critical for effective enterprise governance. APIs are inherently difficult to visualize, making it essential to invest in m...
Workspaces
Establishing common workspaces for producing, onboarding, and consuming APIs helps standardize and stabilize the API experience in numerous ways. Platforms like GitHub and GitLab increasingly offer...
Governance
Governance is the experience of keeping API operations consistent and aligned as they scale across teams and time. It is the discipline that connects strategy at the top to the rules being enforced...
