Are we building smarter tech stacks or just adding more tools?

Meg — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:54:45 +0000

“We’ve already moved from paper to digital…but now we’re entering what I call the era of 'digitaler'. Not more tools, but better-connected ones. Not digitising for the sake of it, but simplifying the digital world we already live in.” - Andy Jackson, Lead Product Manager at Signable

That line from a recent piece by our product team really stuck with me. At Signable, we’ve been talking a lot about what “digitaler” means in practice. It’s so easy for businesses to chase more tech - more integrations, dashboards, tools - in the name of progress. But is it actually making things simpler for teams, or just moving the complexity somewhere else?

So I wanted to throw this question to the Dev community:

How do you balance building or using APIs that simplify versus APIs that add another layer?
What makes an API “developer-friendly” to you? Documentation, setup speed, sandboxing, consistency?
And what’s one thing you wish more SaaS platforms understood about how devs actually use their APIs?

If you’re curious, here’s the full piece that inspired this post: The ‘Digitaler’ Era: APIs for a Smarter Tech Stack. Would love to hear your takes, especially from anyone who’s built or integrated an eSignature or workflow API. What’s working, what’s painful, and what would you change?

DEV Community: Meg

Are we building smarter tech stacks or just adding more tools?