Before writing any API governance rules, you should first map your entire API landscape by surveying every spec, protocol, gateway, and contract in your portfolio. This evidence-based approach lets you derive rules from actual patterns in use — like how APIs paginate or handle auth — rather than imposing external style guides that most existing APIs will immediately violate. Landscape mapping surfaces orphaned specs, unknown owners, and missing sources of truth, and it transforms governance from an opinion-imposing exercise into a fact-reporting one. Teams are far more receptive to rules grounded in their own portfolio's dominant patterns than to preferences imported from a conference talk.
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