Delivery & Growth
I was the senior-most product owner and team lead of the API First Initiative making Verizon’s advanced networking capabilities available to enterprise developers worldwide to, in the words of Executive Vice President Joe Russo, assist them in…
“enhancing customer security, reducing pain points in customer interactions, and enabling the creation of novel experiences.”
My role
Associate Director, Product Development
My group
Global Networks & Technology (GN&T)
Time frame
December 2022 to December 2024
My responsibilities: Developing and growing capabilities for internal and external API discovery, evaluation and usage.
What that entailed…
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Product direction
Led a full-stack team that tripled in size to ~30 and concurrently developed both internal and external API developer portals via Agile methodologies
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Feature delivery
Shaped the platform strategy and the architecture, tech stack, roadmaps, and milestones of its developer portals.
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Partnership enablement
Spearheaded leadership presentations, intra-company demos and internal comms while owning relationships with hardware, software and staffing vendors.
Results delivered, Momentum built
From the moment I joined as a founding team member in late 2022, I steered the API First Initiative through rapid growth and complex business challenges.
In addition to building an API management platform with automated self-service capabilities, asynchronous workflows and hooks into new and legacy systems, the initiative required transformation of how software products and services are conceived and built company-wide.
Toward these ends, I rallied Verizon’s ranks around the vision – Product, Marketing, Legal, IT, Finance and more – while continually delivering new platform capabilities under increasing budget and time pressures. The collaborations helped ensure a balance between technical requirements and business outcomes.
Despite difficulties onboarding offshore talent and provisioning them with laptops and applications, my team met an aggressive six-month launch deadline set by leadership. Our first developer portal release on Aug. 15, 2023 was lauded by my group’s EVP.
I successfully navigated technical and operational obstacles by…
Forming and guiding modular teams of PMs, architects, developers, designers and more
Collaborating with delivery leads and SMEs across 3 vendors to ensure all back- and front-end deliverables were defined, scoped, prioritized, developed, released and promoted
Continuously evolving the platform narrative as new capabilities emerged and insights were gained via market and competitor analysis plus developer and stakeholder feedback loops.
Achievements
Internal API developer portal — Launched Aug. 15, 2023
Featuring…
A unified catalog with metadata filter and search across RESTful APIs and CAMARA specifications; GraphQL endpoints in 2025
Standardized API documentation pages sourced from Markdown files at runtime
A Support feature integrated with ITSM tools for API owner interaction
A self-serve form to request access to APIs from their owner(s)
Guides on API integration, platform capabilities and more
A blog providing thought leadership and news from leaders, team members and I
User-centric design: the first release applied insights from 30+ developer portals and addressed developer needs through tailored user journeys crafted from in-depth research, user personas and use case analysis.
The internal portal…
…significantly reduced API documentation overhead, accelerated API adoption to 50% within my business unit, and helped transform API management from a manual process to an automated one capable of scaling in concert with API First’s growing ecosystem.
In its first year, the internal API developer portal experienced a…
1,600% increase in monthly active users
900% increase in APIs onboarded
25% increase in API access requests from Q3 to Q4 2024
External API developer portal — Alpha testing in March 2024; beta trials in December 2024
Featuring…
Enterprise-grade API management capabilities with feature parity to the internal API developer portal…
- A unified API Catalog with standardized documentation and self-service access management and support features
- Bespoke, solution-focused landing pages highlighting wireless and wireline API capabilities and business value
- Intuitive navigation and smart metadata linking related APIs within solution bundles
- Two wireless network performance APIs and four wireless fraud prevention APIs were onboarded for direct trials with external partners.
Two of the four fraud prevention APIs were simultaneously offered through joint ventures with Ericsson and Vonage.
Partnerships with a major US bank and a newly-acquired mobile virtual network operator granted access to the anti-fraud APIs, contributing to 4 million call volumes routed through API First’s geo-redundant external gateway in November 2024.
And in December, agreements were established with several identity verification providers, further solidifying the APIs’ adoption and extending their reach across key markets.
Technologies
• RESTFUL + GraphQL APIs • NodeJS • NestJS • AWS S3 + Lambda • CI/CD pipelines • Markdown, MDX + JSX • Typescript • Temporal • Grafana • Localytics • Git • AI - LLM tools • Contentstack + Adobe • OAuth 2.0