Most governance advice assumes a clean slate. Real estates are not clean — they are hundreds of specs that predate whatever standard you just wrote. Turn a strict ruleset loose on that and you get a wall of red, every build fails, and within a week someone quietly deletes the CI step. The rules didn't lose on the merits; they lost because there was no honest way to adopt them incrementally.

I help you roll governance out the way it actually sticks. We snapshot the estate as it is today into a ratcheting baseline, so existing violations are acknowledged rather than pretended away, and the pipeline fails only on new problems from day one. Then we burn the baseline down on a schedule the teams can live with. This is the difference between governance that runs and governance that gets switched off.

The other half of a rollout is exceptions — because there is always a legacy endpoint, a deadline, or a deliberate deviation that can't be fixed yet. I learned this standing up API governance at a large financial institution in New York, where every line of business was its own tribe with its own strong opinions. The thing that worked was not a stricter linter; it was a sanctioned exceptions process: you could have an exception, but it was owned, time-boxed, and written down — and if you wanted to reuse it, you came to the governance review and argued for it. An exception maker built into the tooling is what stops people from routing around the standard entirely.

This is people work as much as tooling work. As a longtime Spectral maintainer put it to me, the hard problems here are organizational, not technical — teams cannot even agree on what counts as a breaking change. My job is to give you a rollout the tribes will actually accept.

I build the supporting tools in the open, so you can start free and keep what you build: Governance Baseline snapshots today's violations and fails only new ones, Governance Waivers makes every exception sanctioned, owned, and expiring, and Governance Scorecard shows whether the estate is actually getting healthier over time.

What you walk away with

A ratcheting baseline so governance can adopt on a legacy estate without a wall of red
A sanctioned exceptions process — owned, time-boxed, and reviewed — instead of teams disabling rules
A phased burn-down plan and the review cadence to run it
Governance the lines of business will accept, because it meets them where they are

Let's work together

If you have a ruleset nobody has adopted because it lights the whole estate up red, that's exactly the problem I solve. I would love to talk.

Get in touch — info@apievangelist.com

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What you walk away with

Related reading & tools

Let's work together