Teams were building APIs without a shared language for reviewing them.
We saw this pattern repeatedly. A backend engineer would ship an endpoint. A product manager would accept it. A technical writer would document it. And somewhere downstream, an integration team would discover that the naming did not match any convention used elsewhere in the same product. Nobody had the vocabulary to catch it earlier.
The issue was not a lack of intelligence or care. It was a lack of shared reference points. When teams do not have common examples to reason from, every design decision becomes a first-principles debate. Those debates are slow, often unresolved, and rarely produce durable agreements.
