IT leaders are pressured into increasing their teams’ productivity. According to Mulesoft, 38% answer with an APIfication program. Sipios has helped 5 IT departments and developed a scale-up inspired methodology.
According to Mulesoft, IT managers have faced a 30% increase of project requests from business lines in 2019, while being given a budget increase of only 10%.
To face this challenge, APIfication makes reusing code easier, and thus limits redeveloping components when launching new projects.
"One bank, for instance, created a library of standardized APIs [...]. Doing so reduced traditional product-development IT costs by 41 percent and led to a 12-fold increase in new releases.s - McKinsey Study"
An important prerequisite is the creation of a clear and shared standard of what makes a quality API.
We use the term "Stripe-level API" as Stripe has based its strategy around providing the best APIs to become the number one option for developers. Stripe now registers more than 250 millions requests a day, deploys more than 4000 API versions per year and maintain around 500 API endpoints.
Stripe uses Amazon's "Working Backwards" methodology, which puts the user at the center of the API conception process. APIs must thus be designed and develop in order to maximize the developer experience (DX).
In order to optimize it, we set up an API Gateway and a developer portal. Many technologies exist for those components and we usually recommend Apigee for most IT contexts. Those web interfaces allow the publication and consumption of API by project teams. AT&T has seen a 1500% increase in API calls and an increase in productivity of 25% by setting up these components.
A framing phase with your technical architects allow creating standards including:
We prioritize the APIfication of components with a good degree of reuse and a low migration overhead. For each component, we:
We follow 2 KPI for these phases:
The creation of a community of practice around APIs, animated by a Sipios evangelist, is a key process to trigger the adoption of APIs and best practice around it. Joining this community of practice should be optional, but time has to be allocated to involved participants. They are to help project teams, organise meetups and trainings, participating to conferences, producing documentation, and creating Proof of Concepts for innovative new technologies.
Trainings created by the community of practice should be provided to each project team's tech lead.
