I think I have been able to connect the dots between the business and engineering signals I have been gathering as part of my work on Nafitko Signals. I have been drowning in the very technical signals for a while now, looking for how I can align these technical aspects of integrations with the business reasons for some time now, and I think I am beginning to find the signal in the noise. It will take me more time to scale what I am doing across hundreds of services and many different industries, but I am getting closer than I have ever been before.
Signals
You can the motivations and intent behind the integrations an enterprise uses through the words used in their job postings, press releases, blog posts, and public GitHub repositories The problem that I found is actually connecting those business and engineering words that describe the intent behind the integrations needed to power each enterprise I am profiling. I have been exploring these signals from 15, then 30, then 60, and now 75 companies in hopes of seeing a better way to connect the dots at scale across all of the industries I am targeting. The key being “at scale” — I can do manually, but I need it to scale.
Services
One of the signals I have been gathering as part of my Naftiko Signals work is the 3rd-party service in use by enterprises. I have gathered thousands of services, but I then sort them by ow many companies have adopted them. This is the list I am working from when it comes to profiling APIs, looking for more signals, some business signals, but mostly engineering signals. To profile each API I produce an APIs.json of the operations surrounding their API, but also OpenAPIs for each of their APIs, producing a rich manifest of what is happening when an enterprise puts a service to work, or what is lost when they do not tap into.
Tags
Each OpenAPI for the services I profiled possess tags for each operation, which in aggregate provide a rich look at the resources available for each service. You can use these tags to search and filter the operations being when defining capabilities and shaping the sandboxes I am currently building to power Naftiko development, but also empower our design partners to shape their MCP and agent development. Tags are how you make sense of the resources you have at scale across hundreds or thousands of services, using them as your vocabulary for further refining and making sense of the signals we’ve gathered and translating them into business value.
Operations
Next, I wanted to be able to be able to make sense of the technical bits available across these APIs by extracting all of the individual operations, along with their path and HTTP method. Across the 34 services I’ve profiled so far, I was able to extract almost 30K individual operations, which can be used to understand what is possible with each service, but also what is possible with each enterprise that has adopted a service. The summaries from each operation provides a human-readable descriptions of the operations, skills, tasks, and other actions that can be taken when you have adopted any service, and provide the tooling context we need to automate.
Roles
Last week when I began working to find the signal in the noise I wanted to work from the business and human dimensions, and I accumulated 100+ roles that I am looking to align these thousands of operations with. I began taking the entire list of operations and then asked Claude to help me align with what each of the business and engineering roles would be interested across any of these services and their operations. It produced a very interesting look at what each of the roles will be interested in, giving one more way I can build bridges between all of the technical bits available across these services and do the work to align them with business outcomes and the intent behind why each of these people who are in different roles will want access to 3rd-party APIs.
Industries
Once I found this bridge between API operations and business roles, I got back to work on finishing the association that each company I was profiling, with the industries they operate in, their number of employees, and how much annual revenue they have. This gives me another way that I can filter roles, and connect with operations, but then I also realized there was a way that I could generate common business processes and workflows across the operations by industry. Connecting the dots between each of the enterprises, the industries they operate in, and the services and individual operations used to execute each part of the workflow, providing me with yet another way to bridge the engineering and business signals across this sprawling landscape.
Capabilities
I have only ran a couple of tests. I took all of the operations I gathered and asked Claude to organize them based upon the common business processes employed within insurance, banking, and shipping & logistics. What it produced reflected what I would consider to be a business capability. I am going to run it against each of the industries that I have profiled enterprise organizations and see what it produces. I have been doing the manual work to develop capabilities based upon my experience, but this was tedious and clearly wouldn’t scale across the thousands of services I am profiling. I am sure that I will need additional data to validate that these business processes are relevant, but it is a promising start.
Intent
What really makes me happy about this work is it gets me closer to the intent behind the people I need to speak to as part of my Naftiko go-to-market motion. Our users will be interested in the technical details and our business buyers will be interested in how they translate into business capabilities. People don’t care about the services, APIs, or even individual operations, but the business outcomes they deliver. This was the first time I was able to translate the investments signals I hav been gathering across these enterprises into technical capabilities, but also translate and map the individual technical operations back into business capabilities and align with specific roles within the enterprise, and the industries they operate in—that is significant.
"Intent without dedicated action is simply not enough. Action without a clear intent is a waste." — Goodreads
