LiveAPI is an autonomous agent for documenting all your backend APIs in minutes in bulk.
Mapping your system and keeping it up to date is very important for multiple reasons.
First, with increase in AI generated code, automating mapping of APIs helps you manage the code complexity.
Second, It helps with discovering, searching, organizing and integrating your APIs
Finally, with the above, your team can deal with vast amounts of code with confidence. And the approach saves time, money and effort in handling your code repositories.
The primary customer problem
We are at a stage where now the core technology piece is almost figured out.
We support around 50 backend frameworks in dozen languages.
Our accuracy is getting better everyday.
And the docs design is becoming more and more easy, enjoyable and helpful to use.
Now comes the question of customizing the core technology to different sets of people.
The analogy I use is of a car engine vs the finished car that's marketed to consumers.
We are approaching a working engine, now we want to focus on people more and more and help them in their day to day lives.
Developers are important, but they're not always glued onto the business
The obvious candidate for a customer are developers working in a team along many teams and repositories within an organization.
Developer fit is super important for LiveAPI.
Our tool must serve devs well.
Therefore developer satisfaction is a necessary condition in our journey.
But I would argue that's not sufficient.
There are plenty of developer tools which developers love, but do not necessarily benefit the host organization make more money, ship more, ship faster or customize more to their customer.
I wouldn't like to name any tool, but we all have experienced solutions which serve devs but doesn't make money for their orgs.
Businesspeople are important, but they're not glued into engineering concerns
On the other extreme are businesspeople who are often quite focused on revenue, profits and gaining customers. But many times they're out of touch with engineering concerns and what developers need to ship more and better.
However business approval is so important because finances are critical to sustaining teams and initiatives.
So businesspeople approval is a necessary condition for a tool like LiveAPI.
They sometimes find it difficult to empathize because their responsibilities are far removed from engineering challenges.
We have all heard stories of business or sales driven approaches leading to destruction of long established engineering teams, ultimately ruining the financial positions of the host orgs
The CTO is accountable to both business and engineering concerns
Of all the types of people in an organization, I believe, the CTO is best situated to judge the worth of developer tools.
They get the developer mindset and how the tool impacts developers daily lives because they themselves tend to be one.
Second, they also get the business impact part because they routinely oversee hiring, setting dev policies, governance and such issues.
Given the unique vantage point, ultimately a tool like LiveAPI must seek to get approval from CTOs more than anyone else.
It means the tool satisfies both engineering and business demands. It means the tool delivers on both engineering and business concerns.
CTO approval means both business and engineering side fulfilled sufficiently
And for this reason, every step of the way, the LiveAPI team vigorously try to earn CTO respect.
When we earn CTO respect sufficiently, it automatically leads to respect from both engineering and business sides as well, validating the real worth of our solution.
Top comments (0)