How Postman uses Postman: leveling up design, testing, and collaboration
We love hearing from our community about how you’re using Postman to improve your API development experience—it truly continues to inspire us. But have you ever wondered how we might be using Postman internally as we’re building the Postman API Platform and optimizing our own workflows? In this series, “How Postman uses Postman,” we’re taking a look inside our teams to see how they’re using Postman.
Today, we’re chatting with Postman Senior Engineer Hemendra Kumar, of the Workspaces squad. Hemendra is based in Bangalore, India.
Hemendra, what do you do at Postman?
I’m responsible for building new features, scaling and optimizing existing systems so that the product is healthy, and mentoring junior engineers.
What were you doing before you joined Postman?
Before Postman, I used to work in the gaming industry, mostly building casual and social mobile games. Prior to that, I worked for a few startups, mostly in the finance space. All my previous work involved the use of a lot of APIs in different formats.
Getting to know the Workspaces squad
What does your team do?
My team works on the core systems that power Postman workspaces. We also work on collaboration features, including commenting, real-time presence, activity feeds, sharing, and inviting.
What’s something you’ve worked on recently?
We launched Partner Workspaces. These workspaces enable our users to securely share APIs with their customers while also allowing them to collaborate with their partners on the APIs.
This feature is not yet available globally, and we are still working to improve it.
Do you have a team motto?
My team is full of health-conscious, sports-loving individuals, and a number of people have been injured while participating in physical activities in recent years. Our team has a saying: “We need to hire a full-time physio!”
How the Workspaces squad uses Postman
Does your team use Postman while working on Postman?
We heavily use Postman to build Postman. In particular, we use Postman to collaboratively design new APIs, test out microservices end-to-end as part of the deployment process, and maintain API contracts for easy onboarding. We also test business-critical flows using Postman Monitors, which are part of our pipeline for continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) after deployment is finished.
How has leveraging Postman Monitors affected your team workflows?
We’ve reduced the number of on-calls and other incidents for the team by having end-to-end test runs catch regression errors in our stage environment.
Was your team’s internal use of Postman a remedy for a one-off challenge, or have you implemented it as an ongoing practice?
It’s an ongoing practice. We use Postman tooling as part of our internal API development processes, from ideation to deprecating an API version. It just helps speed up the development process by keeping Postman as the source of truth.
How did you (or your manager) get team buy-in for implementing this practice?
Fortunately, we didn’t have to convince teammates too much. After folks saw in action how easy it was, they preferred using Postman tooling for internal use cases. For example, a few new folks initially tried to use Confluence for API design discussion, but then they preferred using Postman for future iterations after they saw how easy it was to get design feedback on each variable.
Did anything surprise you about using Postman to solve these problems?
Using your products deeply connects you to customer behavior. Sometimes you discover that internal team members are using a feature in a way that it wasn’t designed for. It just accelerates the feedback loop, which makes the next iteration easier.
What Hemendra has learned from using Postman
Tell me about a recent challenge you’ve had to overcome while working on Postman.
Since everything is free-flowing on the Postman API Platform, one of the challenges we’ve faced with our teammates is creating workspaces and collections in various formats. The lack of standard patterns and best practices made cross-team collaboration difficult. To make things easier, we created some opinionated templates based on industry best practices. The templates help teams quickly set up workspaces and other resources in a simple and scalable format.
Do you have any favorite productivity tips for working with Postman?
In order to test out various scenarios, I usually keep a collection ready to generate different sets of users on different Postman plans. These accounts are extremely useful if you ever need to test outdated or deprecated features or verify backward compatibility because they allow you to quickly replicate a user’s state. This one use case has saved me a lot of time.
What’s something more people should know about Postman?
We provide a range of collaboration features so you can engage with your team in different ways. One of those features is commenting, which you can use to discuss an API’s design and offer feedback. You can also use it to look through previous discussions to find out why something is designed a certain way. I think it’s an underutilized feature in many customers’ API journeys.
What impact have you seen from customers who started using Postman? Or who leveled up their use of Postman?
One thing that our early customers frequently mention is how their API resources were centralized by collections and workspaces. In the past, these resources were fragmented and required a lot more work to simply determine their current state. Another recurring theme we observe with customer teams is increased productivity through faster and parallel execution.
Later-stage customers who use Postman in a more advanced capacity frequently tell us how easy it is to share their APIs with customers, team members, and other stakeholders. They find that rather than simply sharing documentation, it is much easier to demonstrate their APIs in action—it’s much easier to understand an API endpoint by sending a request.
More about Hemendra
Without revealing any secrets, what’s something you’re excited about working on or exploring for the future of Postman?
We are working towards product maturity and enabling really large enterprise teams who use our API tooling differently. I’m pretty excited about some upcoming improvements to help customers manage their API partnerships at scale.
Do you have any side projects or hobbies outside of work?
I love the outdoors and like to run, hike, bike, and sometimes motorbike. When I’m home, I like to read books. I have a particular interest in psychology and economics books.
Is there anything lastly you’d like to share about Postman?
I’ve used Postman many times to get the correct set of data from different products. A lot of products expose much more data through the API than what is shown in the UI. Exploring that data via Postman gives you exactly what you are looking for and allows for automation.
The bottom line
Hemendra’s team focuses on the core systems that power collaboration in Postman, particularly workspaces. The Workspaces team saves time on design reviews, catches deployment errors faster, and onboards new engineers with minimal friction by leveraging Postman’s API design, testing, and monitoring features.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experience, Hemendra!
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