2024 Insights on Securing Enterprise Tech's Buy-In from an API Champion

A Guide for Getting Tech Buy-In In Large Enterprises

This article is part of APIFutures, a distributed, creator-led effort to identify the most significant opportunity and/or the greatest challenge facing the API community in 2024. You can check out other articles and viewpoints on the APIFutures landing page.

Securing Tech Buy-In Will Be A Pressing Challenge For 2024

What a time to be alive.

I spent most of 2023 building and nurturing an API community with the mission of facilitating API excellence in a large enterprise.

Although my Slack numbers were promising, the progress was not as I would have liked, and it felt like the majority of the work fell on my shoulders.

While my experience is based on ‘API buy-in’ then I believe that in 2024, a key challenge will be securing 'tech buy-in' amid rapid technology adoption and escalating concerns for CEOs, including economic uncertainty, climate disasters, civil unrest, wars and AI.

The Annual Reset

Over the next few weeks, organizations worldwide will be convening to establish their OKRs for 2024, setting objectives and key results which are essential for an organisation’s success.

These OKRs trickle down to squads who evaluate how their distinct roles, ongoing projects, and expertise can contribute to achieving the desired key results for the business and its shareholders.

Gaining buy-in and willingness from stakeholders in these instances to support change in an organisation is much easier if it can be aligned with an OKR.

However, not all triumphs originate from strategic planning in boardrooms.

In many organizations today, workplace communities and champions, whether focused on technology choices or better practices, have become a standard feature.

Typically, these communities are started by an individual or group of like-minded individuals who are free to share their passion with others and strive to influence culture change or technology adoption.

Research shows that employee communities retain and attract talent while improving employee engagement at the same time.

Leaders recognize the benefits of these communities and the competitive advantage they can yield for your company.

Should you be passionate about a topic and see yourself as a catalyst for change, here’s a guide to approaching 'buy-in' within a large enterprise informed by my own experiences.

Communicate the vision.

Actively communicate and explain your vision and its benefits to ensure everyone understands.

Why should your colleagues invest their time in your initiative and what are the opportunities for them and ultimately the business?

Selling this vision is challenging when the benefits are not so easy or quick to measure. What is it you trying to manifest?

Here are a few questions to think about:

1. How will this practice/technology/community meaningfully improve the lives of its participants and ultimately affect the bottom line?

2. What will be different in 6 months, 12 months, and 2 years from now?

3. How can you measure the impact?

Understand viewpoints regarding the new technology and/or practice.

I created a Community Charter, assuming everyone was on board the API train.

I have been following the API industry for over 9 years. The biggest mistake I made in building an API Community was assuming that participants understood APIs as I do.

We were not starting from the same place. Believe it or not, the Bezos Mandate is new to some.

On reflection, what I would do differently is understand the current requirements for teams and what their viewpoints are on this new practice and/or technology.

Once you understand this then you have some hope of aligning to what they care about.

Consider a reward system.

Any cultural change needs local involvement and active participation so finding ways of rewarding and recognising efforts is critical.

What’s in it for participants?

Vouchers or other monetary rewards are nice however a tough sell in the current economic climate, neither is everybody driven by money. Now is a good time to pitch to colleagues to set a personal objective that aligns with your community, technology or practice.

We are working on a simple rewards system such as championship badges for use in Slack which is tied to our organisation recognition program.

Praise the good efforts of teams who have adopted your technology or practices.

Reward teams who are good role models with the most interesting work or some other perks.

Be thankful and appreciative if and when others contribute

It’s challenging to find and motivate champions in the organisation, especially when many are already occupied with other commitments. Often, their time and dedication are sporadic, fitting in wherever their schedules allow.

Saying "Thank you" and acknowledging others’ contributions doesn't take much.

For Leaders: Help strengthen the skills of your role models.

Identify and enhance the skills of your champions.

Focus on both their existing abilities and developing key new competencies for their success.

Plan For Failure

What metric signifies that you should not proceed any further?

This is not something that I considered for the API Community however I suspect that I would have quit early on if the numbers did not grow.

For certain technology choices then you need to go beyond a spike and operationalize something for some time - I'm guessing this is going to be the case for much of the explosion of tooling and products that GenAI will unleash.

In a technology world where many are keen to try the latest and greatest in everything then there are possibilities that your technology choice doesn't work for your organisation/team.

What is the plan if the new technology encounters issues during or soon after its implementation?

You need a backup plan for either rolling out the technology choice or simply just living with it and ensuring you've learned the lessons.

Measuring Impact

Measuring the value of a tool, like reducing performance testing time, is more straightforward than quantifying influence or culture change, which isn't as easily measurable.

To secure buy-in, it's important to conduct a value chain mapping exercise to comprehend how your proposal affects the bottom line.

This year, I need to be more strategic and my initial reading of LinkedIn Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework looks interesting.

They have a separate section on Goals, Signals and Metrics.

Conclusion

On reflection, I was not strategic in considering how the API Community impacted the bottom line nor did I consider their role with delivering our Data First Strategy.

Seeking and maintaining active participation in employee-led initiatives is difficult, and participants involved in these efforts struggle to be given the bandwidth to fully develop emerging ideas from these groups.

The reasons vary from cognitive overload, unclear value or false perceptions (“talking shop”), shrinking budgets, lack of reward or recognition and competing priorities.

The reality is that technological and cultural change requires role models and champions.

Intellectually, leaders acknowledge the benefits of employee-led initiatives, yet the reality is that “buy-in” for those employees who are motivated to be change agents remains challenging.

Given the 2024 outlook, this is going to be a continuing theme but please don’t be discouraged.

If you have the energy and the enthusiasm for something then that will shine through and you will no longer be the lone nut - see “How to Start a Movement”

You can check out other articles and viewpoints in this series on the APIFutures landing page.