Driving a Decision You Do Not Own

On a Tuesday morning, a partner's catalog sync stopped working. The inventory team had renamed a field in one of its public APIs the evening before, without publishing a new version, because the marketplace had no rule saying it must. The partner's listings were out of date for two days.

The rule that would have prevented this was already written. Five months earlier, the API Architect had circulated a proposal for versioning public APIs, and it had collected 40 comments from three groups. It was still marked "under discussion." Nobody had rejected it, and nobody had decided it.