Mamta Suri, Workday

Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of the Breaking Changes podcast. I’m your host and Chief Evangelist for Postman, Kin Lane. With Breaking Changes, we explore topics from the world of APIs, but we look at things through the lens of business and engineering leadership. Joining me today we have Mamta Suri, senior manager for software development at time tracking for Workday. Conversations like this one I had with Mamta are why I do Breaking Changes. It helps me learn a lot about the API operations from people who are in the trenches of these enterprise organizations, but it also pulls me out of my bubble, like Mamta did when she turned the tables on me for this interview.

Let’s start with the basics. Who are you and what do you do?

So my name is Mamta Suri, and I’m a senior engineering leader at Workday. I’ve been at Workday for about seven years, and prior to that I was at Oracle, where I was in the Fusion Middleware group, and I was there for about eight years. My background is both in computer science and biology, so I’ve even worked in a medical instruments company as my first job out of college. I’ve been dealing with APIs all my life, starting in college when I actually got a chance to work on the human genome sequencing that was going on at the time, and I was able to do it as part of the UC Santa Cruz team as an undergrad. So that was my first exposure to APIs.

Exciting. Is that what steered you toward technology, would you say, out of the bio realm?

Yeah, so actually when I started college I was going to be a doctor, that was the path I was on. And I started taking some computer science classes just as electives, and I’m like, oh, this is interesting. So I decided to take more, and then I met with my counselor and I said I want to actually major in both, can you help me do that? So I double majored in both biology and computer science. And I knew at that point that I don’t want to go as a medical doctor, because, yeah, just the thought of, like when I volunteered at an ER and seeing everyone there and the conditions they came in, I have a lot of respect for doctors, but for me, I could not keep myself separate. And so I knew that this was maybe not a good path for me. And then I decided to combine the both, and that’s where I landed at my first job for a medical instruments company, where I was working on the software side, but it was for those MRI machines that you see in hospitals. But this was more for research. And so I got to be on the software side, but I got to play around with the brain images and a lot of the different things. So yeah, I got the best of both worlds.

Yeah, interesting journey to find your way to it. So what does Workday do, just for the listeners? What’s an explanation of the services they offer?

Yeah, so Workday is an enterprise company, and we offer different software to help our companies. We have financial, payroll, time tracking, HCM, student, so it’s an end-to-end solution for all of the enterprise needs. We have customers in all of the different industries, financials, also retail, healthcare, and a lot of the different industries, and there’s a lot of the big Fortune 500 names as well.

Yeah, I’m fairly familiar with the APIs, I’ve done several integrations. So what does APIs mean to the organization, what’s the benefit and business value of APIs for Workday?

So APIs right now are at the backbone of most of the things we do. And when they talk about APIs, there’s external APIs as well as internal APIs. What Workday now has is the Workday Cloud Platform, which gives anyone the power to extend Workday. So you can build more applications on top of what’s already provided, and it’s a really cool way to, for your specific use cases that the company wants, they can create those. So it’s REST APIs as well as SOAP APIs. Just to give you an example, an internet service company actually built an app on the Workday Cloud Platform, it was called the transit route search. So employees who traveled to work by train can start the end, then the start time and intermediate stations to find the different routes and pricing, and then once they selected a route, it created an expense report automatically for them. So this was a really cool way for them to combine, they were anyways going to use it, but then they don’t have to go and look for the receipts, it automatically files that expense report for them in Workday. Another example is a global logistics and manufacturing company, they built a vehicle registration application using the Workday APIs, and it would let the employees register their cars and where they park at the workplace. And then the security teams can identify the owner of a car in case of an emergency, or if there’s a parking situation, or they didn’t do a good job parking. So it’s making everyone safer in that respect.

So this gives you an idea on how cool APIs are, because you have your basic foundation, the applications that we provide, which already does a lot of functionality, but then there is a whole set of other use cases that the customers themselves, for their particular needs, they can create on top of it. So those are the external APIs. Now the internal APIs of course, we have our own tech stack internally, and a lot of the things we do we leverage internal APIs for integrations, even between the products or within the same product as well. And a lot of the companies nowadays are moving from monolithic to microservices and using APIs just to break down the functionality. So yeah, I think APIs are, a lot of the industries are really leveraging the benefits of APIs now.

Yeah, you touched on it a little bit, but what I’m seeing with a lot of large enterprises that are well established, when people talk about APIs, I think the lion’s share of the conversation is focused on REST, or what I would consider web or HTTP APIs. But the average enterprise organization, in my experience, has a large volume of SOAP APIs, REST web APIs, as well as, like, GraphQL emerging, and we see event-driven. And this is just because of the legacy journey, the history of the company, but also consumers. There’s just a lot of consumers who have different expectations and needs. So is this what you see across your landscape as well?

Yeah, so we have REST APIs for the products themselves. I just basically talked about the Workday Cloud Platform earlier, but each of the products themselves have public APIs as well that the customers leverage for integrations or for data management. And yeah, we support both REST and SOAP APIs, and that’s because the customers may be using SOAP, that’s what they’re comfortable with, or that’s what their integration is, if there are any third-party vendors they’re using between Workday and their instance. And GraphQL, like you mentioned, is definitely picking up. GraphQL has a lot of flexibility, and instead of the REST where you have to write an API for each of the things that you want, GraphQL provides you that flexibility. But yeah, I don’t see a lot of GraphQL, even when I read the industry newsletters, that there’s a lot of talk about that, which I would think that people would be more integrating GraphQL into it. So yeah, to answer your question in a long way, yeah, I think SOAP and REST are here to stay.

Yeah, I’m seeing quite a bit of expansion of GraphQL, but it’s nowhere near the scope of REST and SOAP. SOAP is still such a massive part of our user base. GraphQL is growing, and I see it over HTTP, but also I’ve seen it over WebSockets, so real-time event-driven GraphQL as well. But it really comes down to, I think it’s going to take a while for it to emerge across the enterprise and people develop the skills they need to understand GraphQL. But we’re big proponents of what we’d consider a diverse API toolbox. There’s no one way to build APIs, you’ve got to acknowledge what your consumers need and really build that.

So talk to me about the different roles that are involved in the delivery or operation of a lifecycle at Workday. Is it just developers, is there QA, do you get product managers, is it a growing spectrum of roles?

Yeah, so we have, our scrum teams consist of very close collaboration with product managers, QA, developers, and automators. So it’s not one person’s job, but it’s very close collaboration, because each role has their own expertise. The product managers know the product really well, they know the customer base, and they interact with the customers. The developers of course are the experts in the technical expertise and very close to the code base, so they know what will work, what will not work, and have those discussions. And QA kind of combines, they know the product, they know how to test it, and we want to make sure that our customers get the highest quality of the deliveries of the features, and they’re really core to making sure that we do that. And of course along with developers, automators also come into the picture to make sure that when we’re building on top of existing things and the new features as well, that we continue to have good automation coverage so that we have that high quality. Workday has a goal of having 95 percent or more customer satisfaction rate, and every year we beat that. So that’s pretty important to us, to make sure that we are meeting customer needs.

Yeah, so that really speaks to a business alignment. In a lot of enterprise organizations I see, there’s still a chasm between the IT and business groups when it comes to APIs often, and the APIs aren’t always, they might be sound technically, but they’re not products, and they don’t really fit a business outcome or business goal. And so having those feedback loops and having those product managers and that alignment, or closing that gap, is pretty key to be able to achieve that level of rating. Impressive.

Yeah, so where that’s what we see is an expansion of these roles, the number of people who are involved in the API lifecycles. And we’re seeing a massive number of requests from our customers around, how do we train up the next generation of product managers and people to be involved in the API lifecycle that maybe aren’t coming from tech backgrounds, maybe coming from others? And as the number of APIs are just everywhere and they’re so critical to businesses, we need these people with a seat at the table. But one of the challenges is making sure that’s a diverse set of voices sitting at the table, and that that API reaches the widest possible audience or set of consumers. So from your perspective, what can we do to get more diverse voices to the table and understanding what APIs are, that they’re not some scary technical thing that they should be afraid of, they can get involved and actually steer the business outcome?

It’s very important that we do get diverse voices across the table. And APIs should just be considered as a tool in the tools that we have, just like in any profession. It should not be the scary thing, and it should be something that we should just think of as a tool, just like in any profession, that this is something you get trained on. So fixing or having the diverse voices, it’s multi-level, right? It starts with the pipeline. How can we make sure that the kids in school get the exposure to computer science at an early age, both boys and girls? So I have a 12-year-old girl and a 9-year-old boy, and what I see in a lot of the computer science clubs and courses that are offered, a lot of the boys will take those courses. So there needs to be intentional work in this area where the parents as well as the teachers are introducing these at an early age, so that this doesn’t become this scary thing. And as a mother, I have exposed both of my kids to computer science, and if they don’t like it, that’s fine, but at least I’ve done my part, that yeah, you can do this. And what I tell my kids is, it doesn’t matter what profession you go into later in life, whether it’s medicine or music or whatever it is, technology is going to be there and coding is going to be there, and if there’s coding, APIs are definitely going to be there. So as long as you understand this, this just makes your life easier. So introducing kids to this concept at an early age is very important. So that’s the pipeline thing.

Second thing is, once women are in the workforce, how do we make sure they stay in the workforce? In December 2020, a McKinsey study came out that, when a lot of people were dropping out of the workforce in December of 2020, all of the people who dropped out of the workforce were women. It was 100 percent. That’s a very scary statistic. So why is that, why so many women dropping out of the workforce? Well, there are a couple of reasons. One is, women traditionally have more at-home duties than men, so we need to level that field. Second is that women a lot of times don’t have mentors or role models to look up to in the workplace, and that’s why they might drop out of the workforce. There are definitely things we can do, making sure to get the support they need, being flexible for care, and I’m not just talking about parenting role but also caregiver role, right? It could be even older parents, and it could be both men and women. So having those flexible policies at companies is very important, so that people are able to do the work job as well as what they’re required to do at home. So Workday has very good policies for caregiving and parenting support, so that is a key to make sure that we keep more women in the workplace.

Another thing is, are those women growing up? When it comes to making those decisions, are they going up the ranks? So how is their career advancement? That is also important. Again it comes down to role models, it comes down to mentors, and it also comes down to a little bit of intention on women’s part, raising their hands saying, yeah, I’m ready for the next role. So yeah, there’s a lot of work to be done in this area, and that’s why I’ve been involved in the diversity efforts for over seven years, ever since I joined Workday. And I’ve actually created and am leading a Belonging Council to make sure that the diverse, and I partner with Women at Workday and other employee resource groups within Workday, to make sure that the communities feel supported, they feel included, and they have a sense of belonging.

So important, definitely goes a long way to start changing the tone of the conversation on these teams and these groups that are running these APIs. And it’s something that changes the feedback loop when we’re listening to consumers, having conversations with the consumers of our APIs, those builders of the application. It’s going to change the tone of those conversations as well, how we listen, how we hear, how we build in features or capabilities that maybe we didn’t hear, didn’t make sense to us because of our bias or our company history. So I really feel this is, and from what I’m hearing across the companies I talk to, they really want to invest in this, make the API lifecycle a nourishing place for everyone to be, and diversify this, because they’re really concerned with delivering products that help them be competitive, help reach larger audiences, underserved communities, outside of our demographic and our geographic region. So I think these are, as far as product management is concerned, I’m starting to see things tipping in that direction. So it’s good to hear that you’re investing so much.

Yeah, I’d just like to add that now there’s a lot of research how diversity helps companies, and one of the things they have come up with, now there’s data behind it, is that diverse voices actually help innovation. So when we’re thinking about solving customer problems, when we’re thinking about delivering a solution, it’s those innovative ideas, when everyone’s thinking the same you’re not going to innovate that much, but it’s that diversity of thought, people coming from different genders, different races, different ethnicities, different backgrounds. I call it more as a diversity of thought, and everyone is diverse. It’s not that each one is different, but where we come from, what school did we go to, what kind of experiences we have, that’s what makes us different from each other. And when we have diverse experiences and diverse thoughts, that’s where innovation happens, and it’s good for everyone. Not just for that group, but it’s good for the company, it’s good for the industry, it’s good for the whole country.

Oh, great. And I think it, that tone that it changes I think is really important. I had a guest on a little while back, Deepa from PayPal, and she’s an API product manager, and she’s working on a book. And she had said that, when she got into API product management, there wasn’t a lot of books out there, and the content that is out there is written by white men, primarily of a certain demographic. And she said it just seemed like it didn’t have all the information, didn’t explain it all the way, there was a lot of gaps in the knowledge, but then also it didn’t speak to her. And so she felt like that was preventing other potential product managers from getting into the space, learning, being successful, even if they were, because they didn’t have all the information that they needed. And then she wanted to try to understand if it affects, who are your consumers, if you’re a partner of an API or a consumer, does it matter to you if you see people that resemble you working as part of the team doing videos, blog posts, training materials, workshops? So I think it goes a long way downstream as part of the API product lifecycle, but also the consumption of APIs as well.

Yeah, and that’s so true. The dialogue is getting changed, and I’m so glad that Deepa is writing this book, that’s going to be, I think, the first book written by a woman in this area. Also, I think we need allies like you. When there’s more voices, and it’s not just the diverse groups but also the allyship is very important, it’s the ally speaking up on their behalf when someone is at the table but they’re not being heard, and the ally is saying, no, this person has a good idea, let’s hear this. And that’s equally important if you were to change this narrative.

For sure. So back to the core of getting more diverse voices involved in the API lifecycle, where are other opportunities for folks to get involved with producing APIs, that maybe they don’t have to have a computer science background, that there’s other ways they can contribute and lend a hand?

That’s an interesting question. There are a few organizations that are doing this work. There’s open source code where you can work on nonprofit projects to get more experience on this, but that does require, it’s a way to learn computer science and then get into that. But also, my kids these days, they use Glitch.io, and there’s another one, I forget the name, but it’s basically a Replit, so they can easily just start a project. There’s already APIs available that lets them do basic things, and then they can go from there. So the ease of use I think is very important. And then we have things like NLP, where there is integrations with Slack, or even on social media there is APIs available from Twitter and Facebook. So even if you are not a developer or coder, you can just look at those, if you have basic understanding, you can look at the APIs that are available, and you can extend them to do what you wanted to do for that particular use case.

Do you think, you mentioned automation earlier, do you think we’re going to be able to automate more? I mean, it seems like there’s a number of APIs, the inventory’s there, interesting APIs, business productivity things we can do. Do you think, I know you’re probably referring to more automation of the API lifecycle, producing APIs, but are we going to be able to automate and include more business users through low-code, no-code, and other types of automation, you think?

Yeah, I think so. So you’re talking about, like, the product managers and getting people involved in the early stage, yeah, and helping them automate their jobs and do more with less and optimize their teams, but without having to write code hopefully, or that they’ll be able to use APIs in their job and be more successful without being a coder.

Yeah, absolutely. I think there are a few different tools that already do that. You can even build apps these days without any coding language, and there are platforms that help you do that. So yeah, absolutely, quickly. I think even with the product managers, having an inventory of the APIs that are available and what is it that we need to do next, and having a basic understanding of that, I think a lot of it also just comes down to documentation. So just like with our public APIs, we make it available to the users, definitely the product managers can do that. And yeah, there are product managers even at Workday who are very well versed with the APIs that we have.

Yeah, I’m hopeful, because I’ve been evangelizing APIs for the last decade, trying to make people aware of them, because I think they’re kind of like the banking system for me. Like, you should have a certain level of personal finance and banking knowledge. You don’t have to understand how Swift and the banking system works, but you should know how much, who has access to your bank account, your credit cards, your balances. And I feel like the tools we use, the SaaS services we use, you should know there’s APIs behind them. And so I’m always trying to help people see that and understand that they can automate in their job, in their work. But a lot of people tend to be afraid of APIs, they’re technical and I’m not a technical person, is what I hear a lot.

Yeah, that’s a very good analogy, I’ve never had it put that way, that you should know which credit cards you have and who has access to those, which banks you have. And yeah, that makes sense. I’m going to use that if you don’t mind. But yeah, definitely with the no-coding and things like that, it’s very helpful to just look at the APIs that are available and what it could do, how you can extend them. So even on the Workday Cloud Platform that we have, it’s very easy to use, you don’t even need to be a developer, but it provides a very nice interface where you can extend your application with the use cases that you want, and it has very good documentation and step by step on how to do that.

So as a professional, trying to stay aware of what’s going on in the world, the tech space, or your career, how do you stay sharp, where do you find information, what do you read to keep being able to do what you do?

There is a lot of information out there, so it’s actually the other way around, it’s what do I filter out and make sure that only the relevant information gets to me. There is information overload these days. So definitely the company blog, the blog, I do keep up with that, because even within the company there’s a lot of innovation that’s happening. There’s a lot of industry newsletters that I subscribe to which are for the computer industry in general. But also on the diversity side, then also on LinkedIn, trusting my network on what they are sharing, and again choosing what to read or not to read is also important. So I mean, there’s a vault of knowledge out there, it’s really choosing and being intentional about what do I want to focus on right now and what do I want to focus on later, and what’s relevant to me right now.

Yeah, no, I like that. And that’s why it’s one of my kind of stock questions I ask people, and I always feel like, oh, maybe I should stop asking this question, but I really like the answers I get, the finding the signal in the noise, reducing the information overload. I think that’s great advice.

Well, this has been great, I really enjoyed listening to your journey in your career and your view of things. Definitely APIs at Workday I think are an interesting fundamental part of our economy, like literally, and how businesses work. So it’s great to have you on the show. Thanks for coming and sharing today.

Yeah, thank you so much, Kin, I really enjoyed talking to you, and thank you for doing this and even talking about diversity in the API. Happy to. Thank you so much. Well, flip the tables, what do you want to talk about?

Yeah, so Kin, thank you so much for doing this. I’m really curious, because I wanted to ask you a few questions and learn from you hopefully. So how many interviews have you done on this subject so far?

Well, Breaking Changes, I believe I’ve done 50 shows, almost 50 shows and conversations with different folks since June of last year. So it’s quite a mix of people. I would say last season my diversity numbers weren’t as high. I believe it was less than 25 percent female, and I think it was even worse, my black and brown people on my show and voices sharing. This season I’ve balanced that, and I would say we’re well over 50 percent in all areas as far as shifting that. And I have to call out to my partner in crime, LaTroy, helping me on that front. So I feel like the first kind of 2024-ish and then the last 30 have been out of my comfort zone, as a white male living on the west coast of the US working in tech, both voices and diversity, but also international too. I’ve really been doing a lot more interviews on other continents and other views of the world, so it’s been very rewarding, I’m enjoying it.

That’s great to hear, and I’m really happy to hear that you’re over your 50 or almost 50 percent in this season. So tell me, since you have done a big number of interviews, what are the top three insights you gained by interviewing different people in this industry?

I mean, I wouldn’t say I gained, but it’s overwhelmingly enforced what I already suspected, what kind of put me on the trail of the APIs back in 2009-10, which is the APIs aren’t what matter, it’s everything that happens around them and what gets enabled, the business outcomes, the business use case, the feedback loops that exist. So it’s very much the value, and why APIs matter is squarely in the human camp. And the majority of speakers on my show have acknowledged that. And I would say, similar to what we just talked about in our show, API product management is one of the most important aspects of the conversations I’m having. And this is not just Breaking Changes, I have five to ten customer conversations, Postman customer conversations, each week, and I also hear it there. A tech-driven API is great, there’s a lot of need there, the technical details are important, but if they’re not in alignment with business outcomes and have business stakeholders involved, they’re just not meaningful. And so that’s, I would say, the top thing that I’m hearing, having product management and the business cases around what the APIs can do, not necessarily what those APIs are.

Correct. Yeah, and the impact they’re making, why consumers want them, validation that, every feature that gets added has customer demand for it, we’re not just adding it for the sake of some cool new feature, and it’s not just one customer wanting it, it’s actually a diverse range of customers. So like one loud customer or the angriest customer doesn’t get the feature, that’s got to have actual diverse business use case. Makes sense.

Absolutely. So, Breaking Changes, the name, explain how you came up with the name.

Well, I have to give credit to my CEO, Abhinav Asthana. It was his idea, and he was pretty pleased with himself when he came up with it. So for everybody who’s listening, because this show isn’t meant for outside of technical circles, hopefully reaching a business audience, a breaking change, in technical speak, is when you put out an API, it has certain properties and characteristics. Kind of like a web page URL, you can change the parameters of the URL, the queries, to make a different search, say you’re searching for products on a website, or in this case an API. When you release the next version of that API, if you remove some of those parameters or you change a name, it’ll break people’s applications or integrations. And so when you release a new version and you make a change, if you remove something or change something and don’t communicate it properly, that’s considered a breaking change. And so my belief on breaking changes is breaking changes don’t exist, there’s just changes without people communicating with consumers. And that would solve the problem. If everybody was on the same page, your breaking changes wouldn’t exist. But Abhinav thought it was pretty clever, because it’s one of the top pain points in the API space. So Postman’s a testing tool, we help you identify breaking changes before they go into production. And so Abhinav thought, oh, a newscast or podcast about the API space with information and news and knowledge, why don’t we call it Breaking Changes, and kind of make a play off of that.

Yeah, that’s a clever name and very catchy. So there is a lot of talk about diversity these days, and you mentioned that earlier as well. So from your interviews, what are still the challenges that, from your perspective, you see that women are facing?

Well, I would say currently, as a manager, I’m seeing this, I have a team of 25 people that I manage, and watching, and in the conversations I’m having on Breaking Changes, it’s that home load that you talked about, that imbalance that exists in the home environment, that combined with work is like the biggest challenge. It’s, all right, well, I gotta quit, I’m gonna go start a business, or I’m gonna go work in something to pay the bills, but I gotta be at home, I gotta juggle kids, I gotta juggle schedules. And in a COVID reality, I’ve seen a lot where that pushed people over the breaking point, where they leave a perfectly good job or career to prioritize the things that matter in their life. And so I saw the COVID version of that.

But I would say second to that is, and this is one that I struggle with a lot, I work really hard to try to shut up and be quiet in meetings and get better at stopping and listening and creating pauses for people to speak, rather than me just dominating the conversation. And so once I kind of woke up to that, I would say I didn’t really start seeing the effect of it until like 2012, I hate to say, I’m pushing 50 years old, and really until my wife kind of clued me in, pretty aggressively, to, you’re being very loud and you’re dominating the moment, and you’re really not giving people the oxygen or the space to speak, other men, women, anybody. And so once I saw, like, I thought I was just being smart and I thought I was just contributing to the conversation, I didn’t realize I was shutting other people down and not leaving room for people to speak. So I would say from my vantage point, that’s the biggest, is we just don’t carve out the space for other people to jump in, have a conversation, lead, own. And I think white men, and white men specifically in tech, we need to learn to be quiet, listen more.

So how, that’s very true, that a lot of times either there is no space to speak, or there might be, even if an idea comes that may get over-talked or not even considered, and that’s very common, it’s been happening for years. And like you said, once you got conscious of it, you are trying to do better. But how can we even make people aware of it, where they don’t have aggressive wives who point this out to them?

Yeah, so I would say probably advocates such as myself, speaking out about it like we’re doing here. But what woke me up to it is, my wife has a blog called Hack Education, she works in the edtech space, and she’s been really popular and famous, and she’s written quite a few pieces and big publications. And seeing firsthand how people treat her, I’ve seen emails in her inbox from CEOs of edtech companies who sell their wares in schools, in our public K-12 schools, call her a name and tell her that she should shut up, on their corporate email. I’ve seen behaviors like this, and she’s very outspoken, and she’s not afraid to point something out and call someone out for something. And so, hey, she calls me out, which was really awkward. I only met her in 2008, and we’ve recently been married, so in the early days she was calling me out for a lot of things, and I was just like, okay, it was hard to swallow at first, and then I got used to it, and I got to see that she never did it unless I was doing something pretty jackass. And so once I started seeing it, calling it out in other situations is really hard. I have done it in a couple situations this year. I’ve had two situations that were open source communities, heavily male-dominated things, and pointed out, hey, there was someone contributing and doing something, and she was ran off because of the way the conversation was, and pointing out that they were just joking and being guys and joking, but it actually made someone feel very uncomfortable. And then they really got upset with me, and people were like, why you gotta always be causing problems. And I started seeing, I’ve seen several of these situations play out, and I’ve called out and taken the heat for a few of them now. And I would say it just needs more people doing that, and it’s not easy. I really hate being that advocate, to go say, hey, you guys just made her feel really uncomfortable, or really pushed her out, or didn’t give her the space. But it’s the only way I think we’re going to physically carve out that space. Because I think a couple of the times I did it, they were just like, whatever, I’ve got work to do, I’m gonna go do my thing, I’m not even gonna say something, because it’s so much work for them to have to do the calling out. So I think it’s going to take advocates, male advocates and white advocates, to do it.

Yeah, that is that reality, and I’m glad you’re advocating. But like you said, it needs to be repeated, it’s not a one-time thing, because it takes time for people to realize, even if they are doing something wrong, and then to alter that behavior. And people don’t like to be called on, even if they have done something wrong, they take, try to swallow, yeah, it’s very hard to swallow that. So it’s going to take a lot of work, I agree with you. But please continue to do that, we need more people like you. And I’m so glad that your wife, what’s her name? Audrey. Audrey speaks up and is not afraid to say what’s on her mind, and also call people out, even with the hate mail that she gets. And despite all of that, because the thing is, it starts to get to you. We’ve heard all about the imposter syndrome, and it affects men and women, both of us. But when someone just repeatedly tells you that you are not good enough, not even in an obvious way, but in a subtle way, like talking over you or running over your ideas, or joking around with your bodies, all of these little things start to add up, it brings the confidence down. And a lot of times we actually already have to do more work to prove ourselves, and when this starts affecting your self-confidence, then the more imposter syndrome keeps going deep into that, and then that’s what we have, then people start, more women start leaving the workforce, and not just women in general, but other minority groups also. So yeah, but I’m glad that we are having conversations, because every little bit helps. Although there is a lot to do, but what I’ve realized is that every little bit helps, even when you called out that group in particular, it helped. And then someone else might get the guts to then speak up and say, no, don’t do this, this is wrong. We need all of our allies to speak up, to be our voice when we are in the room, and also more importantly when we’re not in the room, because there’s back talks and other things that happen that we’ll not even be aware of. So thank you for doing that.

Can you tell me, 10 years from now, what do you envision the future will be?

Great question. Well, so I feel like, I wouldn’t say I’m working myself out of a job, but similar to the web, there’s no more web evangelists out there advocating for the web, hey, you should do a website. So APIs, I feel like 2016 I kind of went over the mark where mainstream businesses are doing it, it’s gone mainstream, everybody’s got APIs, every type of organization, every business sector. So I think there will always be a role. I’m Chief Evangelist, and I’m known for my blog called API Evangelist, but I don’t think there will be any more evangelizing here. But there’ll still be the need for the information, the knowledge, the practices, the standards, everything else I do. So I don’t think I’m working myself out of a job, but I think where it’s all going to be is it’s all going to be a lot more plug and play. It’s all going to be, like, I think the automation that we talked about, people will just be able to connect the different softwares they use. There will always still be friction, because most of the friction with integrating with APIs and keeping them going isn’t technical, it’s actually rate limits and unreliable APIs and startups going away or being acquired. There’s a number of reasons why it’s hard to connect different companies together, anti-competitive behavior, there’s a lot of things. So I feel like APIs are just going to be more commonplace, you’re going to be able to drag and drop and connect and have flows of data between many different APIs. And we’re going to have more AI and ML helping us.

But I think what’s going to be really big is the politics of APIs, is what I would consider. So I see the API space in a Venn diagram of three spheres. It’s technical, it’s business, and it’s the politics. And so the politics of APIs is already shaping it, it’s like the FTC investigating Facebook for anti-competitive practices with their API when it comes to Instagram and WhatsApp. It’s healthcare interoperability, like you’re seeing with, if you do business as a state in the United States with the federal government, with Center for Medicaid and Medicare, you have to have a FHIR-compliant API. So it’s going to be things like that that are more mandatory in industries that are utilities, energy, like critical type things. So you’re going to see more regulation, but it’s just going to be more of the same. But there’s going to be more privacy, PSD2, GDPR, sorry, GDPR and CCPA, too many acronyms in my head. So privacy things like GDPR and CCPA, giving users more access to their data. So the net in 10 years, most of the conversations are going to be policy, legal, governance within the enterprise, things like that. It’s going to be more business and politics rather than just tech and business, if that makes sense.

Yeah. And I wish there was more interoperability also, which we are lacking in some cases. iOS APIs and Android APIs are a great example of that, where if you have to build a native app, you have to actually build it twice in both languages. There are wrappers coming around on top of it which makes it easier, but yeah, the interoperability, and the politics that you talked about I think also affects that. But yeah, more regulation is also, as people are understanding the privacy issues, the ethical issues around it, it’s more coming into light, but I feel it is, even our politicians who are making these policies or are proposing these policies, even they need to be up to date with all of the different things that are going on, and we’re just moving in such a fast pace that it’s really hard to catch up.

Great. So thinking about my last question, we already talked about as an ally, but we could be doing better. And as an API developer, what can we be doing better?

Simplify and standardize things. In the API-first reality that I live in right now, you try and encourage people to be design-first and invite more stakeholders to the table, kind of slow down a little bit, be more thoughtful, make sure everyone’s on the same page before we release that next version or that new API. And a lot of developers are resistant to that, where they’re just like, get out of our way, leave us alone, let us do what we do, we’re trained programmers, this is what we do, we’re coders, I don’t want to listen to business stakeholders. You just see a lot of those legacy kind of illnesses from the IT and developer space still present. And I think, as a developer, you want to do good work, you want to do quality work, you want to feel accomplished in your job. I think what you and I talked about earlier around the API product management, embrace more of that process. It’s not like only a small set of what you do is actually writing code, there’s so much more in what you do. And I think if we, because I’m a programmer, if we embrace that, I think the delivery, the producing and consuming APIs is going to be more inclusive for more people, it’s less hostile, it’s less aggressive. I think if we embrace, I’m not saying we have to embrace design-first, that’s just one approach, but we need to slow down and not just be solo cowboys delivering APIs.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Kin, I really enjoyed our conversation, and thank you for sharing your thoughts with your viewers. Thank you so much, this has been great. I love this, by the way. Everyone, this was her idea, to flip the table and interview me. So I’m very thankful for being here. Thank you for having me.

Thanks again to Mamta for stopping by. For more on Mamta, you can find them on LinkedIn, and you can learn more about Workday at workday.com. You can subscribe to the Breaking Changes podcast at postman.com/events/breaking-changes. I’m your host, Kin Lane, and until next time, cheers.