Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
I’m in the business of studying the signals that emanate from large systems. The only way to truly understand a large system is to study its inputs and outputs—otherwise, you risk getting lost inside the machine. Right now, I’m neck-deep in analyzing signals gathered from more than thirty companies across several leading business sectors. This work is part of market research at Naftiko and the foundation of our initial pilot customer program. But as I study these “signals”, I’m starting to see something bigger—patterns that extend beyond Naftiko or any single company. The more I connect the dots, the clearer the broader narrative becomes.
Signals
The signals I analyze come from the companies themselves—or more precisely, from the systems I’m mapping from the outside-in. These range from job postings to GitHub repositories—the daily “exhaust” of enterprise operations. There’s no single source of truth, and direct conversations with company leadership always provide more depth, but job posts, blogs, press releases, social media, and repositories reveal a surprising amount of information. When validated through interviews and workshops, they create a remarkably rich picture of a company’s direction.
Companies
I began with fifteen companies that I know well, but then expanded to thirty-plus by adding each one’s top competitor. This helps me feel out an ideal customer profile across industries I already understand before venturing into unchartered territory. I chose high-profile companies in sectors that clearly need what Naftiko is building. While most have similar career pages, their blogging, press, podcast, GitHub, and social activity vary widely—producing very different signal volumes that must be normalized for comparison.
Investments
For each company, I’m looking for signs of where money, time, and attention are flowing—what technology matters right now. Hiring patterns are strong investment signals. Press releases reveal official priorities. Social platforms like LinkedIn and YouTube add color, exposing where specific teams or groups are focusing. Across twenty-five data points I am tracking investment in API integration and automation, but also in broader categories like cloud and SaaS spend, artificial intelligence, and data—providing me with key indicators of digital maturity.
Services
A company’s dependency on third-party SaaS tools shows up everywhere: in job posts, press releases, GitHub repos, and even team social media. From these traces, you can infer AWS versus Azure usage, version control preferences (GitHub vs. GitLab), CI/CD maturity, observability practices, and even which AI models they’re using. Once you assemble even a minimal picture of a company’s services, you can begin to understand its operational maturity, platform evolution, and investment costs—adding deeper meaning to its overall signal profile.
Domains
From those service-level signals, you can begin mapping resources into domains—identifying both current investments and future potential. Domain mapping of third-party services is often overlooked in domain-driven design, yet it’s crucial for aligning business and engineering with business strategy. Given the scale of most SaaS portfolios, these domains reveal where knowledge and power are actually concentrated. Organizing third-party services into domains is a starting point for understanding and managing the enterprise through a business-aligned lens.
Maturity
Alongside domain mapping, Wardley mapping helps assess the maturity of the services a company depends on. It shows how new or commoditized each service is and how visible or invisible it is to internal and external stakeholders. These insights reveal how best to leverage different services—whether to engage leadership, customers, or partners—and where innovation or risk is most likely to emerge.
Platform
Once you’ve organized a company’s third-party investments and assessed maturity, another signal emerges: how far along a company is in their platform journey. Clues come from infrastructure signals like CI/CD pipelines and gateways, as well as hiring for platform engineering or DevOps roles. Understanding a company’s platform maturity helps determine what it’s ready for—especially in areas like artificial intelligence and automation—and where it may still need to evolve to catch up.
Pricing
With a full inventory of services, you can then map pricing models: by user, usage, subscription, or model. The spread of pricing across a company’s SaaS portfolio reveals its economic flexibility and scalability. Simply grouping services by pricing type—then comparing against employee count and revenue—offers a quick sense of how “future-ready” a company is and how agile it can be in managing its growing cloud, SaaS, and AI spend. And that’s before factoring in open-source.
Capabilities
All of this leads back to Naftiko’s core focus: quantifying what each company is capable of and how it compares to others. Capabilities are determined by investments across domains, operational maturity, and the degree of platformification. Pricing and service composition show not only what a company can do, but how fast it can adapt—and at what level of risk—when market conditions shift.
Open Core
As part of the analysis, I also study open-source adoption—starting with Apache, CNCF, and the Linux Foundation, but extending to individual tools and standards used within each company. Open-source participation, contribution, and community engagement reveal where a company stands in its digital journey. Open-source underpins every signal I track—API, AI, integration, and automation alike. A company’s willingness to not only consume but also contribute to open-source is one of the strongest indicators of where it will be a decade from now.
Commercial Fabric
Signals, or those bits of data emitted by enterprise system are how we understand an organization’s internal and external outputs. There’s no single ideal state, but the ability to gather, measure, and interpret signals across teams, domains, and systems lets us see where an enterprise stands and how it fits within the market. A disciplined, tactical approach to capturing and interpreting inputs and outputs is how we tame the complexity of large enterprises and make sense of their motion in real time.
Strategy & Tactics
There’s no universal fix for enterprise operations—only a series of right-sized steps, taken at the right time. Language helps here: the synonyms for “signal” capture the full spectrum of what I’m listening for—action, alert, clue, cue, evidence, indicator, message, proof, sign, suggestion, testimony, warning, wave. I’m seeking the right environment within the right company—those at a pivotal moment, already investing in strategic change but hungry for tactical moves that drive meaningful progress today.
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think” ― Gregory Bateson