Need Business-Person Self-Service API Design Without Backend Build
Business product managers need to design and stand up the APIs they need without having to develop a backend, because most enterprise APIs are data APIs and the design work is about assembling existing data.
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Persona Story:
Riley is building the V2 platform around a simple end state: business people, not engineers, should be able to say “I need an API,” design it, put it together, and get it — without having to develop a custom backend. Most of the APIs in the portfolio are data APIs, so the actual design work is about pulling together the data the business needs for a product, not about writing services from scratch.
Problem Context
- A growing portion of API providers inside enterprises are business product managers, not engineers
- Most enterprise APIs are data APIs — the design task is data assembly, not service construction
- Existing platforms assume the provider has an engineering team to build a backend behind the API contract
- Federated back-ends already exist; what is missing is the control plane that lets business people compose them into shippable APIs
Problem Impact
- Business product managers wait on engineering queues to ship APIs they could have designed themselves
- The platform team becomes the bottleneck for every data API even when no real backend work is required
- Time-to-market is set by engineering capacity rather than by business clarity
- The “API manager as a control plane for business people” stays a roadmap item instead of shipping
Naftiko Today
- Executable YAML capability specs let a business product manager declare consume + expose without writing a custom backend — the spec is the API
- HTTP and JDBC / ODBC consumers in the framework cover the data sources most enterprise data APIs draw from
- MCP and HTTP exposure layers turn a declared capability into an immediately usable surface without bespoke engineering work
- outputParameters with JSONPath and field renaming let the business product manager shape the response without writing code
Naftiko Tomorrow
- CLI wizard (Second Alpha) will give business product managers a guided design path from “I need an API” to a shippable capability spec
- Starter templates (Second Alpha) will let business product managers begin from a working pattern instead of a blank YAML
- Naftiko Shipyard MVP (Fleet Second Alpha) will give the business product manager the workbench where capability assembly happens visually
- OpenAPI-to-Naftiko import (Second Alpha) will let business product managers reuse existing API definitions as the starting point for a self-service capability