---
published: true
layout: post
title: 'API Governance: 10% Care, 60% Don’t Have Time, 30% Do Not Care'
tags:
  - Governance
  - Politics
  - Guidance
image: >-
  https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/algorotoscope-master/america-under-socialism-angry-king-crown.jpeg
---
When you crunch the number of visits, engagement, and contribution across the self-service aspects of your API governance, and then you do the diff with the conversations and feedback at API governance reviews, you begin to get a better understanding of the state of API operations. The people who read and put the self-service documentation to work, but also then show up to API reviews prepared demonstrate you know you are on track with your API governance (guidance). The question is how to help demonstrate to those who don’t show up prepared that you are there to help them in your busy world, and not be thrown off track by the people who don’t care and just want you to get out of there way. While it is something that will vary from enterprise to enterprise, in our experience these conversations break down along these lines.

- **10% Care** - These are the ones that all your hard work on documentation and other resources will pay off, validating that you are doing good work.
- **60% Don’t Have Time** - These folks will come into design reviews with a variety of attitudes, but mostly they just want things fixed to meet deadlines.
- **30% Don’t Care** - These are the folks who didn’t read the docs, come with to reviews aggressively, and work overtime to make your work more difficult.

The trick with all of this is how do you stay on track with the work needed to support the 10% of folks—they need you the most. Then convert as many of the 60% as you can with snackable guidance and support in motion so that you demonstrate that you truly want to make your life easy. After that you just hope that your bosses have enough power and support to give you the cover you need to not let those who don’t care derail your work, bog you down in meetings, and require yet another round of documentation and evidence to show that API governance matters. It is very important that your API governance is seen as guidance and not just enforcement, otherwise you cannot move people from the 60% into the 10% bucket, otherwise the 30% bucket will increase and evidence will gather that API governance is just yet another bottleneck in the way of enterprise progress. 

P.S. Just because you do not care does not make you a bad person--there are plenty of valid reasons why people are pushed into not caring.