Disintermediation. It’s a term we more often use when referring to the removal of intermediaries in economics from a supply chain. It’s how modern companies reduce liability and/or reduce costs. Rather than hiring employees in-house to do the work, they hire a sub-contracting company with different guiding principles.

It may bemuse you to suggest: your API program is probably operating the same way. Different API teams + different guiding principles = different supply chains. Producing their own products. Products that must be compatible with one another. Your customer will insist upon it. Maybe not today, but they will when they begin to scale their application. Can you imagine if a Lego block supply chain was producing a disparate type of Lego block? What if you had a hundred Lego supply chains?

A cohesive set of guiding principles is critical. For your API development teams, your “supply chains.” We’ve become so consumed with getting APIs out the door, getting our developer portal up, we’ve forgotten the most important thing. The human experience of our APIs. Of the app developer. And what app developer would want to use your APIs if they knew that two years down the road, they won’t be able to easily integrate your other supply chains?

I’ll be talking about the guiding principles that are key to the compatibility of your supply chains. And to the future loyalty to your API program.