Postman Pro is the contract between operations and engineering at Coursera
Customer Company Size
SME
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Postman Pro
Tech Stack
- React
- Scala
- Cassandra
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Coursera is an online education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide to offer courses online. The platform supports over 17 million learners, 1700+ courses, and 140+ partners. Coursera pioneered the concept of MOOCs (massive open online courses) in early 2012 with the mission to provide universal access to the world’s best education. The platform caters to two sets of users - learners and university partners. While learners can choose courses across different domains, the partners seed the ecosystem with fresh course content. Coursera has dedicated engineering teams attached to these sets of users, building the product in a service-oriented architecture.
The Challenge
Coursera, an online education platform, has experienced a massive proliferation of APIs due to its service-oriented architecture. The platform caters to two sets of users - learners and university partners. Each product feature built for the learner side has a corresponding administration feature on the partner side, resulting in hundreds of APIs. In 2015, Coursera underwent a significant growth phase, transforming their learner side product based on user feedback. However, this rapid innovation required a dedicated operations team to help partners quickly upload new content to meet the increasing demand in learner courses. The operations team often had to request engineers to manually update the content every time partners wanted to change or add something to their courses, leading to potential productivity drops.
The Solution
To address this challenge, Coursera adopted Postman Collections for critical endpoints. Postman's user-friendly GUI made it an ideal tool for the operations team, who could use these Collections to complete their tasks with minimal knowledge of REST internals. This approach empowered the operations team to support partners, breaking the time-sensitive dependency on engineering. Engineers could share a set of well-documented endpoints that were guarded by validation and internal-only auth rules. These Collections were defined early in the development cycle, serving as an agreement between front end and back end developers. This solution not only improved operational efficiency but also reduced interruptions for the engineering team.
Operational Impact
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