API Strategy as a Product, Not a Project

Most enterprise APIs are built the way they're funded: as a project, scoped to a specific integration need, shipped, and then left alone until the next project needs something similar and builds its own slightly different version instead of reusing or extending the first.

Treating APIs as a product — with an owner, a roadmap and a consistency standard enforced across teams — is the difference between an API estate that compounds in value and one that compounds in inconsistency.