Postman and PayPal Case Study: Reducing Time to First Call to One Minute

Quick Overview

PayPal significantly reduced the Time to First Call (TTFC) for developers interacting with their APIs down to just one minute by leveraging Postman collections and workspaces, which have become integral to their internal and external developer communication and integration processes.

Key Points: PayPal achieved a Time to First Call (TTFC) of 1 minute for developers by focusing on the ability to quickly move from looking at APIs to invoking them using Postman collections. Swapnil Sapar, a principal engineer at PayPal, confirmed that their APIs are foundational to their business, moving billions of dollars, making transaction dropping impossible. PayPal uses Postman both internally to produce APIs and externally via Postman's public network to offer products and services to outside developers. The Postman collections and workspaces have become PayPal's 'everyday vocabulary' for communicating about API behavior and removing friction in invoking APIs. PayPal launched its first public Postman collections in April 2022 and the collection currently has 30,000 forks on the Postman platform. Madita Tuari, Senior Director of Developer Experiences, noted that Postman allows showcasing APIs so developers can play with them quickly and interact with multiple APIs simultaneously. PayPal uses Postman collections to capture every single behavior of the API, ensuring developers can provide quality integration capable of leveraging PayPal APIs without dropping transactions.

Context: PayPal, driven by a mission to democratize financial services and educate customers, relies heavily on its APIs, which move billions of dollars and are foundational to the business. To streamline developer adoption and ensure robust integration, PayPal partnered with Postman. Key speakers included Swapnil Sapar, Principal Engineer, and Madita Tuari, Senior Director of Developer Experiences, who detailed how they integrated Postman's platform for both internal API production and external developer onboarding.