Thread by @apihandyman

Need to explain to your bosses why should you invest time and money in your APIs’ quality?

At IT level, better APIs leads to a better system organization, and also more modular and decoupled systems

Your developers loose less time integrating the different systems and are able to deliver faster

That means IT is able to deliver new products and new features faster.

It means that even working on API just at IT level enhances your business possibilities: less money spend on development and faster time to market means more business opportunities

Icing on the cake, IT people getting used to simple integration with APIs start to wonder why it shouldn’t be the same with all other aspects of IT. And so everything goes faster and better

Obviously, not investing in API quality just at IT level will bring the exact opposite: more time spent on integrations, more money spent, longer time to market, business opportunities missed, less money gained, and your company ends

And that’s just APIs at IT level. But now what about providing APIs to your customers or third parties?

Provide terrible partner/public APIs and nobody will use them unless they are forced to. So you’re basically throwing money by the window

People will choose your competitors because your don’t provide APIs and because they are terrible (BTW read this to know how I participate to CFP apihandyman.io/analyzing-a-so…)

For example, when the N26 neobank was looking for a consumer credit partner in France, the winner was not the biggest/cheapest but the one providing the best API and shorter time of integration

Your customers will go elsewhere because they can’t easily or can’t at all integrate your services in their ecosystem

If by chance people use your terrible partner/public APIs you’ll spend months on integrations, spend month doing support

So not investing in your partner/public API quality will at best cost you money because of the super-hyper-extra time lost. At worst you’ll loose current and future customers. All this causing the slow death of your company

There are companies that “heavily”invest in their API quality. Some having dedicated team helping the other creating APIs because that investment is peanuts compared to the possible gains and losses of not investing

And if you think I’m stating the obvious and “everybody knows that”, you are living in a bubble. You are in one of the happy few companies that understand the true importance of the quality of APIs.

And even in such companies not everything is perfect and everyone engaged and skilled in being #apifirst But that’s another story