“Is that API ready to go yet?”

It’s a phrase that can strike fear in the heart of any API developer, especially if the answer to the question is “not even close.” In an ideal world, the final steps of developing an API would be making a few final tweaks and adding a bit of polish, rather than a mad dash to the finish line.

In reality, delivering an API can be an extremely stressful process. The pressure to review documentation, check your security, and test functionalities while making sure you’re not breaking existing integrations with clients is real… especially when ownership is unclear.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Various studies suggest that tweaks to API design and development processes can improve productivity and/or reduce the time needed for development cycles by 20-30% or more.

And, there’s much more to this issue than “get an AI coding tool to do it,” although it’s certainly a factor. Below, we’ll cover some of the ways in which you can build a repeatable system to accelerate your API development and improvement.

1. Treat APIs Like Products

There is, within some organizations, still a tendency to treat APIs as an afterthought. Although the industry-wide shift towards API-first, and particularly API-as-a-product, has done a lot to erode the mindset of “APIs are just techie side projects,” vestiges of it still remain.

As such, work relating to APIs can sometimes become the sacrificial lamb. The more this sort of work is pushed to the back burner, the more the idea that APIs are just a way to expose the functionality of the “real product” rather than freestanding entities is reinforced internally.

One of the best ways to get around that is by treating APIs like you would any other product. That means assigning a product manager to each API you’re working on, setting realistic timelines for delivery, and fostering best-in-class developer experiences​​.

2. Standardize, Automate, Empower

You can also foster agile API development by standardizing and automating as much of the process as possible. That might sound counterintuitive, given that the section above suggests treating APIs with lots of care and attention, but both things can be true at once.

Defining API contracts early, using a specification like OpenAPI or AsyncAPI, aids with everything from early validation to improved clarity around internal communication because everyone involved is on the same page and speaking the same language, as it were.

A 2025 article in IJITMIS by PwC Salesforce Developer Sagar Chaudhari, for example, found that “implementing standardized system APIs results in a 31% reduction in integration complexity and a 27% improvement in system maintainability.”

In a talk on developer experience, Microsoft’s Kristen Womack covers the Familiar Hallways methodology. “Putting [things] in a view that feels familiar to people who are working across them is very helpful to know that you’re not lost,” she says, referring to API consumers.

But standardization can be just as powerful for illuminating next steps for developers to take when building APIs as well. Creating processes that can be duplicated across API projects empowers those working on them to kick off tasks without having to wait around for approval.

3. Use the Tools

The design-first approach outlined above also facilitates the rapid production of documentation and testing, some aspects of which can be automated. Standardization is particularly helpful when it comes to leaning on the wide range of tools out there designed to help the process of API development — SDK generators, documentation and portal generators, and so on.

Atlassian’s James Navin was already singing the praises of spec-first API development for accelerating the production of APIs back in 2019, but another advantage offered by using standard specifications is that it’s more likely to result in machine-readable documentation.

That’s useful here because it means you can use it in conjunction with AI coding and optimization tools on an ongoing basis to test for errors, generate code snippets, and check the viability of agentic consumption for newer versions of APIs.

Indeed, DreamFactory’s Terence Bennett estimates that manual API creation may result in development cycles 3 to 4 times longer than an AI-assisted version of that process. API management solutions and gateways, design suites, and monetization tools can also help to speed up these cycles when deployed effectively.

4. Test as Early as Possible (and Iterate Often)

There’s so much more to effective API lifecycle management than the simplistic “release, new version, deprecate” approach adopted by some providers. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that the evolution of an API begins long before it’s actually deployed.

Make sure to test your API with an early user base and gather as much feedback as possible. Try to ask the hard questions, too, like whether or not the product is something that they would actually pay for in the future. If the API is designed for internal use only, make sure it actually solves everyday needs across different departments and that your team knows about it.

As for when the API has actually been released? Tracking time to first call, churn, call success rates, and other metrics, is a great way to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. Observability is a hot topic in this space, and it continues to be one of the keys to shipping faster and releasing better products.

Pairing effective observability practices — monitoring things like request volumes, latency, frequent errors, and so on — with continuous deployment enables you to make incremental tweaks to your APIs with a lower risk of breaking changes, and to recover from problems quickly.

5. Promote It

Like any product, every API needs a go-to-market strategy. For an internal API, that might be as simple as finding an evangelist within the company to educate team members about the tool and how it can help them get their work done more effectively than they do without it.

For external APIs, you’ll want to think about appointing developer advocates, as well as leveraging API directories, MCP servers, API marketplaces, hackathons, and other ways to make your APIs more discoverable. In the case of monetized APIs, consider reinvesting a portion of revenue generated back into other forms of advertising and marketing.

Successfully marketing an API is, of course, an art in and of itself. Still, it’s a step that many API developers omit entirely, which can result in an API with plenty of use cases being deemed a failure because not enough people know about it. (Build it, then make sure they come!)

6. Avoid Communication Breakdown

A troubling stat from Postman’s latest State of the API report — check out our deep dive here — suggests that as many as 93% of API teams have problems collaborating, even though 84% of teams surveyed were made up of less than ten people.

Perhaps some of the issues regularly faced during the delivery of APIs are a result of that miscommunication. (A product manager who expects deliverables on their desk by 5 PM on a Friday will always be disappointed if the lead engineer takes off for a long weekend on Thursday.)

Of course, there’s a little more to it than that. But clear communication around roadmaps, building in slack for unexpected obstacles, and realistic targets are all crucial when it comes to API delivery. A quote attributed to Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto states that “a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” Well, the same is true for APIs.

7. Embrace the Mindset Shift

The aim here is not to cut corners to deliver APIs or version them as fast as humanly possible, but to look at where pain points currently exist and reduce friction. Because it’s practically a certainty that every API developer has at least a couple of them they’d like to fix, and that won’t happen overnight.

Almost all of the points made above have something in common: they involve handling APIs in a way that’s very intentional. Speed might be the goal here, but it’s also a byproduct of productizing APIs and working to create systems that remove friction from their creation.

The good news? Postman’s 2024 State of the API report found that 63% of teams surveyed could produce an API within a week, jumping from 47% in 2023, with a combined 33% deploying APIs hourly to weekly. In other words, plenty of API developers have already adopted this cultural shift, and more of them are doing so by the day.

With the right systems in place, next time somebody asks, “Is that API ready to go yet?” you might just be able to answer, “Absolutely, we’re just about to put it live.” Of course, if you’ve improved internal communication enough, they’ll already know that’s the case…