API Governance Is 75% People Work

Everything I’ve written about in this series up to now — landscape mapping, OpenAPI, JSON Schema, policies, Spectral rules, design-first, Git, the IDE, the pipeline, shifting left, reviews and provenance — all of that is the 25%. This post is about the other 75%, and it’s the part nobody wants to hear, because you can’t automate it, buy it, or skip it. After hundreds of enterprise conversations and a year of doing this work at scale inside a genuinely demanding operation, I am certain of this: API governance is mostly herding, navigating, and building trust with humans, with the rest a mix of