preface

In October 2021, I joined 10x Banking as a product owner for the API platform team. At that time, the company was rapidly expanding the REST API for its core banking platform, which involved not only the development but also the governance and deployment of the API. Balancing the urgency of deploying APIs quickly with the need to adhere to our organization’s API style guide amid collaboration with numerous feature teams presented a challenging yet exciting dilemma.

Despite our efforts to streamline processes, including improving our management of Jira tickets, I found myself constantly searching for more effective solutions. This search led me to Melissa van der Hecht’s insightful presentation on “APIOps: Automating API Operations for Speed and Quality at Scale” at apidays London. Her emphasis on automating the entire API life cycle resonated with me, prompting weeks of research into how we could adopt these principles at 10x. By January 2022, I had devised an API Enablement plan, which was well received by our managers. I also shared it with colleagues in our internal API community of practice (which we called our API guild), and together we embarked on this journey of change.