All organizations want to minimize risk and make the future as predictable as possible. Becoming API-first will help you do that. It helps reduce your legacy baggage, ensuring that your teams are always iterating and innovating to embrace the future as it arrives. API-first is about using APIs to rapidly iterate and map out change as it is happening, allowing teams to respond to whatever comes their way. That can help you resolve challenges ahead of the competition.
These are the elements of advantage when it comes to API operations.
- Innovation - As an enterprise, you are able to make innovation part of your operational DNA, with teams actively flexing their innovation muscle, experimenting, and engaging with consumers to find the business value in what comes next. You are modernizing legacy infrastructure and delivering the services the business needs today, while also innovating and learning what is needed for tomorrow.
- Agility - Teams are able to respond quickly to market shifts, taking knowledge from regular day-to-day operations, but also experimenting via labs, and other innovative techniques. Then they respond with new products that meet a changing world. The process involves starting with well-oiled enterprise API operations, then responding to whatever comes next with small, quick, and well-informed iterations, using the digital resources and capabilities needed to accomplish goals.
- Velocity - Teams know what they are capable of, and are able to increase or decrease velocity as required by the business and consumers. Having just the right velocity needed to respond to shifts in the market can move you ahead of the competition. Velocity will take a lot of training and experience, but with the right investments across the API lifecycle, teams will have what they need to respond to whatever comes their way.
- Change - Change is embraced in an API-first environment. It is expected, welcomed, and seen as the right way. Teams are well-versed in defining, designing, and delivering API-driven change, and leveraging the feedback loop from these iterations to inform what is next. A Jobs-to-be-Done attitude equips everyone with a focus on the value present in change, and their training and confidence will prepare them for the work required.
- Control - Leaders have the control they need not only to comprehend the state of operations, but to understand it in relationship to external consumers. They have observability and control, making adjustments when needed as agile and responsive teams move in the right direction. Being API-first shows enterprises what they need to do to move forward and shows them the direction they need to take to lead the way.
- Adaptive - API-first organizations are able to adapt to whatever is thrown at them, evolving to serve changing markets and completely reinventing specific domains of the enterprise if required. An API-first approach perpetually finds the optimal state of doing business, delivering the products markets are demanding today, while also being prepared for what is needed to lead the way tomorrow.
There is no way to predict the future, but APIs give us a proven way to respond to any number of possible futures that may arrive tomorrow. APIs don’t necessarily reveal exactly what we need to do business in the future, but operating in an API-first state means we will be able to quickly respond, evolve, and step up to confidently respond to what the future holds. Being API-first is how companies are staying relevant in the face of a changing demographic and business landscape.