Having worked in software development for over 8 years, I have repeatedly watched developers struggle to integrate APIs into platforms as an afterthought. The situation is common. Someone builds a beautiful web app, then the business team asks for mobile support, third-party integrations, and suddenly you’re reverse-engineering your own application to expose endpoints that make sense.

Luckily, this is changing. With API-first development, we can design the architecture with the API as part of it from day one. This is especially beneficial for SaaS products as they rely on third-party integrations and ecosystem support.