The Human API

The "Human API" is the person in your company who makes impossible integrations look easy.

And they're your biggest operational risk.

Follow me on this journey for a moment. Here is one of my favorite questions to ask leadership teams.

"If the person who handles onboarding left tomorrow, what process would stop working by 5 PM?"

There's usually a pause.

Then someone says, "Oh... onboarding would break. They're the only one who knows how to activate people in the systems."

That's the Human API.

The invisible orchestration layer

Picture someone who isn't just doing HR work. They're quietly acting as the integration layer between your HR system, your identity platform, and payroll.

On paper, those systems are integrated, where HR creates the employee record. The identity platform provisions accounts, and then payroll handles compensation. Typically, it runs nicely and is clean in a system’s way.

In my experience and through many conversations, I can tell you it never actually works that way.

You’ll see contractors getting entered early. Oh, and start dates move around all the time. Background checks can run late, and then payroll needs someone active for final checks. What about those identity systems that should create accounts the moment a record flips to "active"

You see automation that gets turned off, and someone has to take over.

They watch the HR queue every morning. When they see a new hire, they don't activate them yet. If they do, the new hire will get systems access and email weeks before their first day.

Instead, they wait, and on the night before the start date, they manually create the identity account. They assign the right systems access groups, and they provision necessary access. Oh, and then they tell payroll to activate the employee. This can’t be kept up with for a scaling business.

None of that logic lives in the systems.

It lives in this one person's head.

This means they're no longer an HR admin, correct? They're the company's identity orchestration layer, and they are quietly engineering or reengineering the onboarding process.

The off-boarding trap

When someone leaves, it's the same thing. HR marks them "terminated." But payroll still needs them active for final paychecks. Identity systems will shut accounts off instantly if the automation runs.

So this person steps in again. Follow this flow… they run the off-boarding checklist manually, disable identity access, reassign files, remove VPN permissions, and close application accounts. And if they miss one step, a former employee might still be able to log in. It could also be that they need to project manage all these steps and organize someone from HR, IT, and Payroll to get this employee's account shut down.

This is how companies quietly end up with a bus factor of one in their access control system.

The pattern is everywhere

Identity management is just one example. Most organizations have Human APIs scattered everywhere.

Someone manually fixes CRM deals before finance invoices them. Someone cleans up analytics reports before leadership meetings. Someone checks orders every morning because inventory data can't quite be trusted.

These people look like heroes because they save the day constantly. They catch errors before they hit customers. They make broken systems behave.

But they're also exhausted due to all the constant firefighting. That person is unable to take a day off because everything will break. Checking queues at night and on weekends. Carrying tribal knowledge that no one else has. This is way too exhausting to keep up with, right?

What they're really doing is patching architectural gaps over and over again.

The heroism hides the problem.

The burnout tax

This isn't just an operational risk. It's not healthy for the people stuck in these roles.

When someone becomes the human glue holding broken systems together, they can't step away. They can't take a vacation without their phone. They can't focus on strategic work because they're constantly being pulled into manual fixes.

And eventually, they burn out, or they leave. Oh, and when they do, the company scrambles to find someone else who can learn all the unwritten rules living in that person's head.

It's unsustainable for the business and unfair to the people carrying the load.

Scaling people, not systems

When a company relies on Human APIs, it isn't scaling systems. It's scaling people to compensate for systems that don't quite agree with each other.

To be honest, the hardest part of fixing this issue isn't the technology.

It's telling these people that their value shouldn't come from saving the day. It should come from building a system that doesn't need saving.

Building systems that work with people, not around them

Here's the thing…you don't have to eliminate the human element. You just need to put it in the right place.

People are excellent at judgment, oversight, and handling true exceptions. They're not excellent at being the only repository of business logic that should live in your systems.

The goal isn't to remove people from your processes. It should be to build a foundation with clear rules and validation logic.

When that foundation exists, people can do what they're actually good at. QA and smart strategic decisions that allow them to make sound judgments. They shouldn’t be manually translating data or remembering unwritten rules.

When systems have the right foundation, your best people can focus on what matters. And when they take time off, everything keeps running.

That's what sustainable growth looks like.