Weekly API Evangelist Governance (Guidance)
I am doing the work to align multiple dimensions my work to build Naftiko around the very central concept of “capabilities”—which I currently define as open-source, declarative, standards-based integrations that are aligned with outcomes within specific business domains, providing what is needed to deliver and automate integrations across a variety of business use cases that matter to a group of technical and non-technical stakeholders. But, this is a definition I am continuing to refine and polish, with the following areas on the table right now for me to consider.
Alignment
Last week I worked to align my definition of capability with my belief that we need to lead this discussion with business alignment. Capabilities must be aligned with business in this moment. Full Stop! I am determined with this round of investment in open-source to use business alignment as a North Star. Not that I think our moral compass lies there, but that I feel like the bill on our API investment is coming due. I fee like the engineering side of our businesses have dominated and led the discussions in recent years, and we need a little balance back towards the business, and also the people side of things. I feel like this will be the most important lesson to learn coming out of this AI age.
Engineering
Our businesses depend on many internal and external integrations to operate. Aligning these engineering integrations with businesses will required using the inputs and outputs of the services and tooling that are already powering enterprise engineering operations. It is these signals that provide an opportunity for ongoing alignment between engineering and business functions. Open-source specifications are how we will be aligning with these systems, but multi-protocol APIs, and Git-powered CI/CD pipelines will be how we perpetually keep the engineering bit aligned with business—we just need the vocabulary and tooling to do so. We do not have the vocabulary we need because we’ve let engineering own the dictionary and the thesaurus throughout the last decade.
Experience
The vocabulary we use to define, automate, and govern what our enterprises are capable of must be centered around the real world experiences of the people who are consuming digital resources, messages, and events. Experience begins at the strategic levels with cost, risk, and velocity, but then trickle down to the documentation, sandboxes, security, and other experiences that are shaping how we integrate systems and applications inside and outside the enterprise. This experience can be augmented by AI, but it will never be replaced by or entirely orchestrated by AI. There are very human experiences that dictate whether our system and application integrations are working or not working, and these are things that cannot simply be handed over to our agents to deliver consistently.
Customer
I will keep saying it—what you produce doesn’t matter until someone consumes it. So checking in with your customers and consumers as early on in the process is critical to your success. What you are capable of as an enterprise is rendered true or false based upon what your customers need or want. It doesn’t matter how great your idea may be in your head or within your team. The true shape of your capabilities will be defined based upon what your customers need in this moment. Your definition of capabilities might sound like the perfect solution as you lay the groundwork for what you are building, but without validation from customers, you could be heading in an entirely different direction. In the end, without customer (market) feedback loops and buy-in your enterprise won’t be capable of much today, or tomorrow.
Ecosystem
What we are capable of is more often than not defined by external stakeholders and the stories they are telling. Sometimes the only way you can convince the person sitting next to you in a meeting of what is needed is from the outside-in. Ensuring that your capabilities reflect or are countered by people in the ecosystem might be the only way you can win and change hearts an mind within the enterprises systems we seek to change. There is a reason that open-source, evangelism, advocacy, investment, sales, and marketing shapes our worlds. If you aren’t regularly taking the pulse of the ecosystem, community, or markets when it comes to your vision, then it is likely that the meaning and momentum around your vision will fall flat once it leaves the gravity of your enterprise.
Standards
The wealth of industry and Internet standards available out there today provide a wealth of learnings when it comes to shaping what your enterprise capabilities are, aligning your business with the market just enough to ensure they speak to new and existing customers, while still bringing your own special sauce to what is happening. A lot of work has gone into defining standards, and the more governance behind, and tooling in front of a standard, as well as the ecosystem surrounding it, the more alignment you can begin building on from the beginning. In short, the JSON Schema for the standards that matter in your industry can easily be taken to validate your own capabilities, depending on how much or how little you adopt what has already been build ahead of your approach.
Capabilities
So, what is missing from my definition of API capability? I will be workshopping a couple variations of my definition in coming weeks as I continue to align with business and engineering, while working to understand the experiences that matter most to customers and the ecosystem. Ultimately I feel like a lot of this work is already present in the standards I am building capabilities around, such as OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and JSON Schema. I also believe there are significant lessons (good and bad) present in MCP, A2A, and other emerging standards. This is the conversation I am having within the API ecosystem right now, and will continue to explore on API Evangelist and Naftiko Blogs, but also the other Naftiko go-to-market and community activities that I will be investing in for the rest of 2025.
"Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it..." – Mahatma Gandhi