All APIs must be reviewed by legal council and posses terms of service, privacy policy, licensing, and other regulatory and compliance requirements, making sure all the legal bases are covered before any API is made available to any external consumers of digital resources.
APIs Are Legally Covered
Policies
Terms of Service
Terms of service define what consumers can and cannot do with your API. Making these front and center is how you cover the legal side of things and set clear expectations.
Privacy Policy
A privacy policy covering producers, consumers, and end-users is a legal building block that developers need to see before putting an API to work in their applications. It builds trust and covers l...
API Licensing
Licensing is something most API producers skip, but consumers need to understand the legal terms for using the interface, code, and data. Publishing a clear license removes ambiguity and builds trust.
Experiences
Access
I keep seeing teams struggle with getting consumers proper access to their APIs. The sign-up, authentication, and authorization process is where you lose people before they ever make their first AP...
Alignment
I see product and engineering teams talking past each other constantly when it comes to APIs. Without alignment on the why behind each API, you end up with technically sound resources that nobody a...
Communication
I struggle with how little communication happens between the teams producing APIs and the people consuming them. Blogs, changelogs, roadmaps -- these are building blocks that most teams just skip, ...
Consistency
When I look across the API landscape, consistency is one of the biggest challenges I see. Every team does things differently, and the surface area of inconsistency just grows until governance becom...
Legal
The legal side of APIs is something most teams ignore until it bites them. Terms of service, privacy policies, licensing -- these building blocks matter, and the politics around API usage are only ...
Onboarding
I see teams dealing with massive friction during onboarding. If a consumer can't get from zero to their first successful API call in minutes, you've already lost them. Getting started guides, sandb...
Quality
I see the quality of APIs eroding across the landscape. Teams ship fast and never look back, but consumers feel every rough edge, every missing example, every inconsistent response. Quality is what...