I've been working at a SaaS-company for about half a year as a front-end developer, the product has been in production for about 3 years. The codebase has always been quite messy, because many engineers worked on it without any guidelines or even linting.
In the past months, the front-end team worked on a new application that is well documented and maintainable. This resulted in the need of two new APIs.
This resulted in an exchange of JSON-files over email, rather than a proper API-documentation. I am currently in the process of trying to convince the product-owner to allocate time for this, as I'm quite disappointed about the total lack of docs.
Do you have any tips on how to take this on?
If you are expecting clients to integrate with your backend without documentation, and you do not have an enterprise-level agreement, then it would be a deterrent for integration on most teams. Making that case should be straightforward. More documentation would mean more adoption, which means more value for the company.