# API 'Tough Love'
source: https://developer.mastercard.com/blog/api-tough-love/index.md

Authors: Oran Cummins. If we're honest, none of us really enjoy being judged; we don't like to be assessed, scored and critically reviewed. Only in the exceptional case where we believe we come out on top (or possibly near the top) do we warmly embrace the process of assessment and being compared to peers. Many companies have an annual review (including here at Mastercard) and it's never the most eagerly anticipated process. At Mastercard, we continually assess many things and one of them is our APIs. On a bi-monthly basis, we internally publish API scores across all our APIs, which include changes from last score and status on improvements. The report (which includes circulation to the CEO) does a broad assessment of our APIs and includes 'voice of the customer'. There's no doubt that this can be harsh process, particularly on parts of our business that traditionally haven't distributed services over web APIs. As the world goes increasingly digital and web APIs become a key channel for doing business, many of our groups are moving fast to create or mature their web development and API publishing muscle. Even areas of our business that were 'born' as APIs know all too well that the expectation around service quality and ease of integration is very high from consumers of our APIs. Simply put, web APIs must perform every bit as well as our core payments network. As the API team, we oversee this process and critique services published on our global developer platform http://developer.mastercard.com. We give every API a score out of 100 across a large array of metrics - to give you some insight, here's some examples of what we assess on... Product content: e.g. Is the value proposition clear? Is the offering easy to understand? Are there clear use cases? Technical content: e.g. Do we succinctly describe key capabilities and how the service works? Is the detailed technical documentation accurate? Does it conform to Mastercard standards? Are customers able to do full sandbox integration ahead of going into production? Sales \& marketing content: e.g. Do we articulate customer case studies? Are there demos available to help bring to life? Technical performance: e.g. Is the API success rate / latency within thresholds? Is it getting implemented in market in a reasonable time? Are support queries being addressed in a timely fashion? Inevitably ongoing assessment leads to some tough conversations from time to time. However, when we see enhanced content, tooling, simplification of doing business, cool new API functions, we can reconcile this as being 'tough love' where ultimately, we embrace our core values on decency and we all evolve for the better.