Continuous API Management

Chapter 7. API Teams

Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.

Steve Jobs

You may have noticed that we’ve put off discussion about how you create, populate, and manage teams for your API program. While this is a very important topic, it turns out to be quite a challenge to collect and reflect general information about such a personal and organization-dependent topic. Each company has its own way of managing people, its own boundaries within the organization (divisions, products, services, sections, teams, etc.), and its own way of creating some form of hierarchy to manage its people. All these variables make it hard for us to come up with just one set of recommended practices for building successful API teams.

However, by talking with several companies we have been able to identify some general patterns and practices that we can share. In our observations, organizations all use some form of teams, titles, and job roles to describe the work they need to get done and assign that work to the people responsible for doing it. We don’t find much consistency in the titles companies use for the members of teams, but what we do find is fairly consistent across companies is a set of roles for handling tasks within a team. In other words, no matter what titles people have, the same kinds of work need to be done.

This idea of focusing on roles rather than titles is echoed by software architect, author, and trainer Simon Brown. When referring ...