For this episode of the Naftiko Capabilities Podcast we sat back down with Rose Missier of Xero — a few years on from our first conversation about API governance and product management — to check in on what has shifted as AI has reshaped how we design, build, and govern APIs. Rose’s take: the fundamental gap between product, design, and engineering is finally being bridged by tooling that lets product folks engage from the PRD stage onward. Governance is shifting left, becoming spec-driven, and is no longer something only developers understand or care about.
We dig into the friction Rose still sees on the ground — the AI-first race producing a SaaS-portfolio explosion that out-paces governance, the API-discoverability problem that compounds as agents and copilots produce APIs faster than humans can review them, and the danger of putting too much faith in tools and rules to govern away the work. We talk through where centralized vs federated governance lands in the AI era, where context engineering plays in, and how spec-driven development can serve as the negotiation surface between product and engineering — with AI agents iterating alongside both rather than replacing either.
Rose closes with a framing I keep coming back to: governance is a constant negotiation between humans and AI, not a checkbox you complete. The product side knows things engineering does not, engineering knows things product does not, and AI systems do not know to think. Keep the human in the loop and the artifacts iterating, and the gap closes faster than most teams expect.
