Postman

ChargeHub, a service that helps drivers locate over 120,000 public EV charging points across North America, faced a significant challenge in maintaining its always-on platform. The company aggregates real-time data from third-party providers and its community of drivers, which it then makes available to drivers through its mobile and web apps. ChargeHub's API is also featured in mapping products, in-car entertainment systems, and elsewhere. The company recently launched ChargeHub Passport, an app that allows drivers to use multiple charging networks. With thousands of consumers relying on ChargeHub and strict SLAs governing API availability to partners, there was no room for downtime or inaccurate data. The challenge for ChargeHub's agile engineering teams was to maintain high-quality standards without compromising productivity. They identified handover between teams as a particularly risky moment in their development lifecycle, with ad hoc methods of teaching and learning APIs damaging both productivity and code quality.

Cvent, a global event management platform, faced significant challenges with its API discovery due to its adoption of a microservices architecture. The company's portfolio of private, partner, and public APIs had grown immensely, making API discovery almost impossible. This was further complicated by the presence of hundreds of software development teams located around the world. Without a central source of API truth, engineers often recreated functionality that was already available elsewhere in the company. Additionally, the lack of a common API toolset across the company led to less productive collaboration between teams and longer onboarding times for both internal and partner developers. The company's engineering leadership recognized the need for a solution that would address their API discoverability and exploration challenges while maintaining speed and ease of development.

Lightspeed Commerce, a provider of cloud-based point of sale platform for the retail and hospitality industries, was facing challenges in implementing an API-first strategy due to inconsistent API tooling, standards, and processes across their multiple development teams. The company, with teams across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, serving businesses in over 100 countries, recognized the benefits of an API-first strategy for easier collaboration and exposing internal functionality to partners. However, the transition was proving difficult. The Hospitality team, working primarily with external partners, was particularly affected. They needed to accelerate their API development cycle and improve quality, as reliance on legacy manual processes had led to slow feedback cycles, unclear onboarding path for new developers, and inconsistent quality.

Youi, an Australian insurance company, faced a significant challenge in managing and testing its vast portfolio of over 100 APIs. The company's Communications team, responsible for the APIs that run Youi's email templating engine, found their previous testing methods slow and cumbersome. They would manually test endpoints or write integration and unit tests in .NET to execute endpoints. Additionally, they had a legacy system for generating documents that was not tied to automated testing. This posed a risk of introducing regression issues whenever documents changed or new ones were added. The process change at Youi happened organically, with a few developers and QA analysts starting to use Postman in 2016. As its usage grew, Postman became the dominant API testing tool for two-thirds of the organization.

SynapseFI is a company that provides tools for financial services firms and traditional banks to integrate banking products into their applications. The company, which is based in San Francisco, California, uses Postman to assist customers through the API development and integration process. They also use Postman for internal team collaboration and learning. The challenge for SynapseFI was to ensure effective team collaboration during the API development process, train new hires and non-technical team members on the basics of APIs, introduce new features to the team, and engage customers effectively during the API integration process.

The League is a social and dating mobile application, available in several cities in the United States on iOS and Android. It’s an exclusive members-only swiping app aimed at professionals, with the goal of making meeting people a better experience. As a mobile-first company, APIs are the cornerstone of their product. The League engineering team shares collections and folders in Postman as a way to reference and organize the latest versions of their APIs. However, they needed a way to ensure that their APIs were functioning correctly at all times, and to alert them immediately if there were any issues.

Intuit, a company that serves 43 million small-businesses, self-employed, and consumers across North America, Europe, Australia, and Brazil, was looking for a way to make it easier for developers to get started with their QuickBooks Online APIs. The company's core stack is Java running 63 QuickBooks API endpoints used extensively by developers across the world. However, the complexity of the OAuth specification and the variations it comes with made it challenging for developers to easily deal with authentication protocols. Additionally, Intuit frequently helps developers explore and implement their API endpoints at hackathons and other workshops, and needed a way to generate code snippets in different languages or frameworks.

The Eureka Research Platform, a non-profit resource built by researchers at the University of California San Francisco, enables researchers to launch mobile and web-based studies easily and quickly. The platform allows anyone to contribute to their favorite health cause as a citizen-scientist. However, the development team faced a challenge in sharing collections as they were uploading them as JSON files. This method led to confusion among team members as they were uncertain if they were working off the correct version.

HarperDB is a database company that focuses on Internet of Things (IoT), app development, and hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP). The company's vision is to build the easiest databases in the world for any developer to make and maintain on their own. The technology is exposed via microservices or a REST API, and as such, the team relies on Postman to demonstrate their technology. The team uses Postman as an integrated development environment (IDE) for their product. The challenge was to ensure that the HarperDB REST API is well-documented, and can be imported into the Postman app in 2 clicks.

Lucid, a marketplace for market research, provides an automated way to test ads and survey consumers using 15 billion data points attributed to 200 demographic variables. The company has grown significantly since its inception in 2010, doubling in size for the last four years consecutively. With 56 engineers across offices in London, New Delhi, and its headquarters in New Orleans, Lucid recently secured $60M in funding, marking the largest deal in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi combined, within the last decade. However, the company faced challenges in demonstrating its product to sales prospects, particularly those without a development background. Additionally, onboarding new developers and rolling out new features efficiently was a concern.

Spotinst, an autonomous compute management platform, helps companies like Sony, HPE, and Wix cut their cloud compute costs by 80%. Spotinst’s platform uses predictive analytics to provision and manage workloads on the most efficient VMs available with your existing cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba Cloud, etc.). With these predictive algorithms, Spotinst’s platform is able to leverage massive discounts on spare capacity offered by cloud providers while still guaranteeing 100% availability. However, demonstrating the functionality and efficiency of the Spotinst API to clients and helping them understand how to trigger the API was a challenge. Additionally, the team needed a way to investigate client issues and bugs, reproduce and document the specific API behavior, and communicate the issue to the engineer who will be tasked with development.

Sikka, a company that provides API connections to over 96% of retail healthcare like dental, veterinary, hearing, and vision offices, was facing challenges in managing their extensive API structure and frequent updates. They were processing billions of transactions every day and making 8 million calls on their platform via partner apps to support healthcare retailers. The company had grown to 95 employees with offices in San Jose, Fresno, and India, and offered 210 APIs connected to 24,000 healthcare practices across the United States. However, the process of updating new endpoints was manual and cumbersome, especially with the need for confidentiality and HIPAA compliance in the US healthcare sector.

AMC Theatres, a leading customer experience provider in the entertainment industry, was facing challenges in managing and maintaining hundreds of endpoints across many APIs and environments. The team was using a combination of unconnected tools and manual processes to cover the same functionality. This approach was inefficient and time-consuming. Onboarding new developers and partners was also a complex process due to the lack of a standardized format for their API. The team needed a solution that could streamline their API development process, improve collaboration among teams, and make the onboarding process easier.

BetterCloud, a SaaS application management and security platform, was struggling with organizing API documentation and endpoints. The team had to search through various documents and spreadsheets to find information about APIs. Managing existing or new API endpoints was becoming unwieldy. The lack of a centralized system for API infrastructure, documentation, workflows, and test suites was slowing down the engineering team and making communication less efficient. The challenge was to find a solution that could centralize, orchestrate, and operationalize day-to-day administration and control for SaaS applications.

Clarifai, an artificial intelligence company, provides a visual recognition API for app developers to create and train their own machine learning models. The company was founded in 2013 in New York and uses machine learning and deep neural networks to provide a powerful image recognition system used across industries. The technology team has grown to 25 engineers focused on data science, research, front end and back end development. Clarifai has 9 machine learning models written primarily in Python and Go. Every engineer at Clarifai is responsible for testing their own code and completing code reviews for their teammates as well. When a developer at Clarifai has an idea for a new endpoint, they create the endpoint in Postman first.

Cisco, a worldwide leader in IT, has a developer relations team, DevNet, which provides training and education about Cisco’s APIs to network and systems engineers, sales engineers, customers, and partners. One of the goals of the Cisco DevNet team is to help Cisco engineers and partners learn the latest automation capabilities of Cisco’s products and services. However, the traditional interfaces that Cisco engineers and partners have been using for years are not sufficient for learning and experimenting with Cisco's new REST API interfaces.

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.

Hotelbeds Group, a global travel industry provider, relies heavily on APIs for its operations. The company books over 27 million rooms every year from its inventory of 120,000 properties in over 185 countries. The APIs are used by tour operators, travel agencies, corporate clients, and app developers. The challenge was to manage the updates to their API endpoints, especially when developing new features. The team needed a way to share, review, and test the changes in real time. They also needed to manage their configuration parameters and access tokens at every subsequent stage of development, from local to test to production.

Healthwise, a company that creates health education and applications to improve the quality of health care, was looking for a way to provide API collections to internal customers. They wanted to create a 'single source of truth' that could be shared with other groups throughout the company. They also wanted to generate API documentation and create acceptance tests against the APIs. The challenge was to find a tool that could meet all these needs and integrate seamlessly into their existing workflow.

Monetary, a Denver-based payments processing company, offers a connected commerce platform for Point-of-Sale (POS) developers and retailers. The platform provides unprecedented access to purchasing data to deliver a more personalized consumer experience and generate increased revenue. However, the Monetary development team faced challenges in staying synchronized with the latest versions of their API tests. The complex testing methodology for their APIs required them to run millions of monitoring requests every month using Postman. They needed to store response information in environment variables to use in other requests. Additionally, as an early-stage company rethinking the payments and credit card processing industry, Monetary had to ensure strict adherence to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS).

Tyk is an open-source API gateway and management platform with global clients in industries such as healthcare, finance, tech, and education. The platform offers an API Gateway, a simple-to-use API Management Dashboard, and an API analytics and developer portal. Clients can run Tyk in three ways: through an on-premises installation, a SaaS solution hosted in the AWS Cloud, or as a hybrid. Tyk also runs on container management platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry. However, Tyk faced challenges in effectively demonstrating its capabilities to clients, engaging in workshops and meetups, and providing better technical support.

Shopify, a leading commerce platform, provides hundreds of endpoints for all the touchpoints of commerce. The platform helps more than 500,000 merchants and processes more than $40 billion in sales through its platform. The core application is one of the largest built using Ruby on Rails. However, with thousands of partners using the Shopify API to build apps on the platform, bugs are bound to occur. The escalated support teams at Shopify needed a reliable tool to help reproduce the request and debug the issue. Additionally, the Developer Experience team at Shopify needed to simplify the process of working with APIs for developers and make the experience as smooth and enjoyable as possible.

Raygun, a software intelligence platform, is used by approximately 50,000 developers across 120+ countries. The platform processes billions of events every day, recording software errors and end user performance profiles to help technology companies build better software. The company's development team often needs to send data to the Raygun real user monitoring (RUM) API in various server environments. However, the process of manually updating the URL to direct the requests to either the local, office, or production environment is tedious and prone to errors.

The Movember Foundation, a charity focused on raising awareness for men's health issues, has grown into a global movement with offices in Melbourne, London, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The foundation fundraises in 20 countries, and its engineering team has to deal with the complexities of multiple payment gateways and localization issues. The team releases enhancements and new features every two weeks, and as part of their Scrum agile workflow, they need to ensure their endpoints are returning the expected responses. The team also supports a wide portfolio of investments in men's health programs, including clinical registries, health education, and recruitment for research trials.

Microsoft Education, a new team within the multinational technology company, Microsoft Corporation, was tasked with developing APIs for the K12 and higher education market. These APIs were designed to facilitate tasks such as homework assignments, rostering, and classroom notebook use. However, the team faced a challenge in setting up robust integration testing for their APIs. They needed a solution that would allow them to release new changes to production with confidence and efficiency, despite their small team size. Additionally, they wanted to have ultimate control over their tests and integrate them with their own source control.