Hiring great people to run your API program: Where to start? »

Customers ask us all the time "How do we hire great people to run our API program?"

We tell them the same thing we think about when hiring at Apigee. It's about passion and it's about finding people who can work with context, not control.

We lead with passion, not with skills or profiles. We look for people who get what we're doing at a deep level. We focus on how we function as a company. And great hires for API programs are often found from within, or from the ranks of the folks who are already passionate about the approach/program.

Skills and job profiles will get you only so far - passion and talent will take you all the way.

Just like our customers, we serve new constituents every day. We look for people who can explore new boundaries and solve hard problems; people who can make decisions every day with general direction and in a given context.

This is why we also look to hire people that thrive in an environment of context, not control. People who can build the context and have the judgement to take action based on their knowledge of the business problem at hand versus needing a 'command and control' structure.

Context, not control is a huge shift from the leadership and management styles of the past. Netflix continues to be one of the pioneers of this approach and describes it really well here. More on this soon.

I need an API: Where do I start? »

One of the most important questions that enterprises ask us has changed from "Why APIs?" to "I know I need an API; where do I start?"

Start where you have the most amount of pain - where the business drivers are. If your pain point is in meeting demand for mobile and social apps, then start there - with an internal API strategy. If you need to innovate with partners to deliver on a backlog of business development opportunities, start with a partner API. If you need to inspire a broad community of app developers to innovate and create growth and new opportunities, start with an open API.

The lines between internal, partner, and open blur a little more every day as companies innovate at the edge of their businesses. And what starts as one flavor of API can become a different opportunity down the road. We've seen it a bunch of times - an API team learns from internal and partner projects, develops the know-how and courage to open an API to the world of innovative developers who can take the API and the business in creative and valuable directions. We've seen companies have huge success in the opposite direction - businesses starting with Open APIs and realizing that the bulk and the most valuable innovation is coming from partner and internal collaboration.

As long as you start where the business pain is -  you're starting in the right place.

Unlocking business opportunity with APIs and mobile strategies »

I sat down with Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and Christian Reilly (@reillyusa) of Bechtel recently to talk about the evolving API and app economy. We had a terrific discussion about the adoption of mobile devices and how open access to data is unlocking tremendous new business value. Check out the Cloudcast.net podcast.

Christian gives us terrific insight and first-hand knowledge of why it makes sense for a big traditional enterprise to use APIs.  It starts with mobile devices driving the strategy. Mobile devices have evolved from toys in the enterprise to real business tools for people at every level in today's enterprise. We see the same story play out for all kinds of enterprises - from large-scale construction, to retail, to healthcare, to Telco, and others. Data entry and collaboration on job sites and in offices around the globe are now driven by apps on smartphones and tablets.  This increases immediacy and accuracy of data capture and project management, reduces cost and risk, and improves compliance.

In a pre-API world, enterprises were mired in large applications that were bound behind physical and digital walls.  As mobility grew exponentially and with it different expectations from consumers took hold, these large, legacy, internal applications simply couldn't cut it from a usability or user acceptance point of view. An application accessed from a tablet or smartphone through a browser or remote terminal is not  an acceptable experience, as people get used to cool apps for all aspects of their lives on their mobile devices.

In our conversation, I think Christian aptly captured the new environment as one in which "people don't want apps - they want information."

This realization drives a whole different mindset. In addition to the demand for a different experience on mobile than on desktop, enterprises also have to think differently about how to provide access to the information people needed. APIs were the obvious solution. Enterprises can expose read/write access selectively with APIs and they don't have to replicate the entire app.

Adopting an API strategy allows enterprises to do things like focus their investment on making robust APIs, which makes it easy for developers to build apps. Enterprises can leverage the creativity of (in-house or external) developers to build light-weight UIs (which can be very simple interfaces) that allow users to get and put data from anywhere and from numerous devices. They no longer have to be sitting in an office close to the "enterprise applications" and systems of record like ERP or billing systems.

In this scenario, IT became responsible for exposing the business as a platform, driving a fundamental change in the speed at which business can be done. Instead of IT projects taking years, they were now taking months. As a result, enterprises experience higher level of fluidity and flexibility - much more rapid and experimental development cycles and take advantage of natural feedback loops. This all directly relates to an enterprise's revenue and profitability.

Simply, this means that the constant underlying platform is the API. Apps, while critical for the last mile, are a more fluid component, available for rapid change, augmentation with other apps, or disposal.

There are many examples of companies who understand how to apply and invest in APIs in order to support the type of consumer and partner engagement that's the mark of the economy we're seeing in front of us, and they are being directly rewarded in revenue and profit.