Grow an Orchard

Companies like Atlassian, ServiceNow, and many others realized that opening up their platforms to developers was an incredible accelerant for their business. For Stripe and Twillio, their API IS the product. You simply can't take advantage of these services without using the API. This is true for cloud platforms as well. APIs are the engines that drive business.

As you begin to open up your platform to external and internal developers, a logical next step is to start focusing consistency, establishing standards across your organization, and creating an experience for developers that makes it easy for them to leverage your service.

As your organization grows, there becomes a natural tension between moving quickly and ensuring your standards are met. You will want to deliver intuitive and easy to use APIs that will remain stable over time. As your business grows, it's natural for the capability you expose to expand as well. This means that more and more teams will be delivering APIs.

In large organizations, it's common that each team does things slightly differently, and this frequently results in drift from the patterns that you establish. Therefore, a natural tendency is to establish a process that approves every API that gets delivered to customers. While this might work for a relatively small surface area, it simply does not scale.

Balancing all the various concerns when building and delivering APIs is a practice we call stewardship.

The New Oxford American Dictionary provides the following definition: stew·ard·ship | ˈsto͞oərdˌSHip | noun the job of supervising or taking care of something, such as an organization or property: responsible stewardship of our public lands

^{| *[count noun] : he resigned his stewardships at Westminster Abbey and St. Martin's | systemic failures cannot be ascribed to the stewardship of a political party | [as modifier] : Pennsylvania's forest stewardship program.*}

The core principles of an API stewardship practice, that are reflected in these patterns, are education, enablement, and empowerment. API Stewardship strives to balance strict "governance" policies with empowered develpment teams that understand the principles of good APIs, how to build them, and who are empowered to make informed decisions.

As your APIs grow and change--especially over time--you will need roads, gates, and roundabouts. You will need to determine when to hold the line to ensure that breaking changes are effectively identified, managed, communicated.

But you won't be able to scale without tending the garden. For any API practice to be successful it will need to foster a community that values educates, enables, and empowers their developers who build and deliver APIs.