[Q&A] Lessons for Scaling Your API Design with Sanjay Kumar, Product Manager, Center of API Excellence at Capital One

  September 19, 2018

SmartBear Connect is the annual user conference from SmartBear that will be held this year in Boston, MA on October 29th & 30th.

SmartBear is the company behind both Swagger open source tooling and the SwaggerHub API platform. Last year’s event was one of the largest gatherings of Swagger users to-date, and this year we’re adding even more Swagger to the event, with two full days of trainings, workshops, and presentations focused on API development with Swagger and the OpenAPI Specification.

One of the speakers who will be joining us at SmartBear Connect is Sanjay Kumar, Product Manager, Center of API Excellence at Capital One.

In his talk, How Capital One Scaled API Design to Deliver New Products Faster, Sanjay will share lessons learned from establishing a Platform Services Center of Excellence at Capital One, and will show how organizations can overcome the challenges of scaling their API design process across teams.

We recently caught up with Sanjay to learn more about his experience, and what he’ll be discussing at SmartBear Connect. You can read the full interview below.

Without repeating your bio, what should attendees know about you?

My love and passion for APIs. I’ve worked with a variety of APIs throughout my career, both great ones and terrible ones. My experience spans from backend development, designing and delivering initiatives for Marriott’s central reservation system, shifting gears into the end-user perspective with interface design, and then moving toward designing and scaling APIs. So I speak to both the back-end and front-end challenges we all face.

What’s your SmartBear story? How long have you been using SmartBear tools?

I’ve used both SoapUI and Swagger Open Source Editor while at two different companies across my career.  While building the central reservation system with Marriott and then of course with our API Strategy at Capital One.

What is something that you’re excited about sharing with the community during your session?

Overcoming challenges for API excellence. In today’s world, designing APIs well so they’re always extensible can seem like a daunting task. The big challenge is to figure out how to overcome scaling design quality across thousands and thousands of developers. I’ll dig into that more in my talk, How Capital One Scaled API Design to Deliver New Products Faster.

Who do you think would most benefit from attending your talk?

Anyone looking to implement an API Strategy, particularly those looking to design and deploy across a number of different teams and business lines.  Whether you’re a developer seeking insights into designing a great API, a manager looking to streamline your team’s development, or an executive member facing the same challenge we once had of trying to standardize API design and quality across numerous teams and scale over time. 

What are you most looking forward to about SmartBear Connect?

Meeting people! I’m excited to hear everyone’s talks and learn what other teams are doing to innovate within their teams.

What is something people would be surprised to learn about you? (I.e. your fav food/where are you from/ etc.)

Fun fact: I love Avant Garde rock music and am a little crazed over the music of Captain Beefheart.

We hope to see you at SmartBear Connect 2018. Purchase your ticket today.