API wired is not product ready
Endpoints celebrate. Launch checklists look at money moves, invitation state, and incomplete decisions.
Building marketplace-style mobile products, a harsh unit of progress keeps reappearing: “API wired” is not “product ready.”
Accept/Decline invitations, escrow deposits, and real media in chat can all be “done” on paper. That feels like progress until you write the launch checklist:
- Invitations need a first-class surface people can find — not buried ops
- Deposit method must match the UI copy (wallet path vs mystery rails)
- Chat “delete” is often soft-hide metadata — users hear “gone forever”
- Contracts and push sit in productization, not polish tickets
Founders celebrate endpoints. Engineers who ship should celebrate invariants:
- Does money move through the path the user sees?
- Does an invitation change a state the other party can act on?
- Can someone finish an incomplete decision without opening a support ticket?
If any answer is “not yet,” the feature is a demo of infrastructure — useful, but not the product.