A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Use A Score To Build Your API Roadmap And Not To Chase A Number," Kin Lane, November 2, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/11/02/use-a-score-to-build-your-api-roadmap-and-not-to-chase-a-number/
Priya ran product for a payments platform team, and she read the post at her desk with a sandwich she'd stopped eating. She had been dreading the planning cycle. Every year the roadmap turned into a fight between whoever was loudest, and the quiet work lost.
She liked the first idea, a team running everything on its developer portal through a full review and picking out the hotspots. She did not like the number that came next. The Sinch example sat at 71.5, in the exemplar band, and she felt the old reflex anyway: a number means a target, and a target means someone in a meeting asking why hers was lower.
Then she read the facets. Access Clarity at 50, Regulatory Posture at 39, Contract Governance at 22, all under a composite the post called the least interesting thing on the page. She noticed that the author wouldn't polish discoverability if he were on that team. That bothered her a little. Eighty-two sounded fine to her, and she wondered who decided that the weak facets were the ones worth moving. The post only said he would ask whether they were worth moving, and what moving them would cost. She admitted that was a question, not a verdict, and that her irritation was probably about her own roadmap rather than his argument.
The paragraph that stopped her was about the team that didn't want to win everywhere. Her group ran a partner-only API for one large customer, under a contract, with no self-service signup and no public pricing. She had been quietly embarrassed by that for two years. Here it was in plain words: "Losing points there is a decision, not a defect." She read it twice. She also wasn't fully convinced. Writing down that you accept a gap can turn into an excuse, and she knew colleagues who would use it that way. But the post asked for the reason to be written down too, and a reason could be argued with.
She opened the provider page for her company. The post said "Reading a single provider page costs nothing and needs no account," and that held. She didn't try to take in the whole breakdown, only the three piles the post described: "fix this year, fix later, and accepted on purpose." The first pile stayed empty, because she wanted to read the rubric before putting anything in it. The third pile got one entry straight away, the partner API.
She did not touch the rest. The line she kept going back to was "The output is not a higher number." She didn't know yet whether her director would accept a short list of work with reasons in place of a target. She would find out in the meeting.
Before closing the tab she opened a blank note and wrote two sentences. The first named the partner API and said its low Access Clarity was accepted. The second gave the reason: one customer, one contract, no reason for a public pricing page. She saved it where the planning doc lived, and went back to her sandwich.