The agility associated with high performing API-first approaches to business was demonstrated in how Amazon changed doing business with Amazon Web Services, and with what API-first startups like Stripe and Twilio set into motion by enabling the development of ridesharing, food delivery, and other gig economy businesses. APIs allow startups, but also enterprise organizations to rapidly iterate in a way that possesses a feedback loop with consumers, keeping the trajectory and velocity of APIs to move in the directions that matter, increasing the potential for creating entirely new ways of doing business.
The agility associated with a high-performing API-first approach to business was demonstrated by Amazon in developing Amazon Web Services, which changed how the company does business. API-first startups like Stripe and Twilio provide similar examples,. setting into motion the framework for gig economy businesses such as ridesharing and food delivery, among others. APIs allow both startups and enterprises to rapidly iterate while maintaining a feedback loop with consumers, keeping the trajectory and velocity of APIs moving in the right direction and increasing the potential for creating entirely new ways of doing business.
- Domains - Well-defined domains within the enterprise don’t just result in more productivity, quality, and a governed API life cycle. They can transcend their platforms and communities to create entire new industry-level domains. They allow organizations not only to lead, but to set the rules for how the business works.
- Products - An API platform factory floor is capable of delivering entirely new products that markets want and need–as well as those they may be currently unaware that they need. That’s because teams constantly evolve the products consumers need, responding rapidly to changing market demands through rapid iteration of APIs and the applications they support.
- Standards - The design, schema, and approaches adopted across the enterprise can become so mature and useful to business that they begin to be emulated and adopted in other external APIs. They can become the de facto standard within an industry, not through a traditional standards body, but by a forward-thinking company’s leading by example to deliver what is needed.
- Velocity - An API-first company achieves levels of enterprise-wide velocity that other competitors can’t keep pace with. They have no chance of catching up, because by perpetually optimizing the digital factory floor, large enterprises build enough momentum to set the stage for an entirely new way of doing business.
- Pulse - Through an extensive network of feedback loops with consumers across thousands of internal, partner, and public APIs, the enterprise is able to take the pulse of what is needed across an industry, or multiple industries. That allows a single business to redefine existing industries or create entirely new ways of doing business. API-first organizations will shape the business ie categories of the next fifty years. Enterprises that are able to transform their API-first operations into new business models are the ones that will bring us the next big thing. null