Technical standards are so incredibly important when it comes to building a successful API program. I thought I had it made in the shade when in 2017 I inherited the ownership of a really impressive, comprehensive, thorough set of API standards which outlined all the goodness of how we should do filtering, sorting, HTTP methods, error handling, naming, documentation, etc.

What I did not realize however when I signed the dotted line – but quickly learned is that blindly applying standards without enough business context was leading to some super unfortunate design decisions that could negatively impact the consumers of our APIs. This talk is about the dangers of technical over-standardization as a poor substitute for proper business-contextual API design thinking, and how we are course-correcting this by radically changing our culture around how we do APIs toward product led API-First Design in partnership with our UX team.