An API is often the first — and sometimes the only — experience partners have of your organisation. When it is treated as a by-product of a project, integrations become slow, support costs rise and opportunities are lost.
Five principles we follow
- Design the contract first. An OpenAPI specification agreed with consumers before development avoids expensive rework.
- Be consistent. Naming, pagination, errors and dates should behave the same way across every endpoint.
- Version deliberately. Publish a clear versioning and deprecation policy, and keep to it.
- Secure by default. Scoped OAuth tokens, rate limits and input validation from day one.
- Invest in developer experience. Good documentation, a sandbox and idiomatic SDKs dramatically reduce time-to-first-call.
Measuring success
Track time-to-first-successful-call, error rates by consumer and support tickets per integration. These numbers tell you whether your API is helping or hindering adoption.
Find out more about our API & SDK creation service.
