Introducing Teams: Improve Collaboration Across Your API Program

Troy Milan
by Troy Milan on October 4, 2022 3 min read

Giving your colleagues and customers access to your API Catalog should be simple and easy. However, it’s still important to thoughtfully consider access to your documentation and design tools. Accidentally exposing information or losing track of ownership can be embarrassing or costly.

With Workspace Teams, member management on Stoplight takes a big step forward. Now, members can be organized into Teams, and Teams can be invited to projects across the entire workspace – regardless of whether or not they share a group. Hire a new engineer or collaborate with a new API partner? Add them to the relevant team that already has the right access to the right projects, and your onboarding is done.

Teams of People, Groups of Projects

Your APIs are only as good as the people making them and the customers consuming them. Workspace Teams will hasten onboarding and make it easier to identify who has what access.

teams example

We recommend creating Teams that best encapsulate how your organization provisions access:

  • Department: If you’re not picky about edit access, it might be easiest to create an “Engineering” Team and standardize by giving this team the Editor role for every new and existing project. Likewise, you can give Sales, Marketing, and Product the Viewer role.
  • Product Development Teams: Recreate your fun team names in Stoplight, then give Admin control over to those teams so they can take on ownership responsibilities.
  • Multiple Partnerships: Especially useful when there are multiple versions of your public API, you may want to only expose those versions that are relevant for those customers. Creating multiple teams and assigning them to different projects ensures no one else adopts that legacy API you’re trying to deprecate.

With the introduction of Teams, the purpose of Workspace Groups is redefined and more targeted. Groups are now laser-focused on categorizing your projects into meaningful folders, both for better internal organization and clearly segmenting your Projects in the Workspace Sidebar.

drop down side bar

side bar

Depending on your specific needs, there are different ways Stoplight recommends grouping your projects:

  • Visibility: Because groups influence the Workspace Sidebar that guests initially see, there are often different needs when talking about internal-facing APIs or publicly externalized docs and references.
  • Application Architecture: Specific categories for your microservices, monolith APIs, or custom solutions like those for mobile apps can make it easy for engineers to find what they’re looking for.
  • Ownership: When the business gets especially large, identifying the parts of the organization responsible for different aspects of the stack can be helpful.

Safety First

Stoplight makes it clear who can access, edit, and administrate your projects. Workspace Guests and Viewers will never be able to edit projects regardless of what team they are on and Stoplight adds helpful callouts whenever there is a mix of roles on a team.

teams example 2

Get Started and Give Feedback

Workspace Teams is available today to all Professional and Enterprise plans. For those Workspaces that were already leveraging Workspace Groups to manage access to Projects, some Teams have been automatically created to maintain your current access.

If Teams isn’t everything you need or if you see something wrong, drop us a line in our Discord community or submit an idea on our roadmap, or check our documentation on Teams to learn more.

Share this post

Stoplight to Join SmartBear!

As a part of SmartBear, we are excited to offer a world-class API solution for all developers' needs.

Learn More
The blog CTA goes here! If you don't need a CTA, make sure you turn the "Show CTA Module" option off.

Take a listen to The API Intersection.

Hear from industry experts about how to use APIs and save time, save money, and grow your business.

Listen Now