Akshay Nandakumar

Resume

Postman teams

Activated 5 million developers through seamless collaboration on multiple teams.

OVERVIEW

Postman is the world's largest API platform with 25 million developers. Our goal was to accelerate API development by helping teams build them together. As an IC Design lead, I steered a team of designers and formed strategy for unlocking collaboration across teams.

HIGHLIGHTS

Multiple teams

Developers can collaborate in several teams with a single account.

Switch teams instantly

Developers switch between multiple projects during the day. Switching teams helped them multi-task faster.

Share workspaces

Developers create personal workspaces to validate their ideas. They can share them with a team, whenever they are ready to collaborate with others.

DISCOVERING THE PROBLEM

Back in 2021

Postman only allowed a user to join one team with an account. Naturally, we saw a 70% drop-off rate in our invite flow.

A case for multiple teams

Our team received multiple requests from customers to support multi-team membership.

Developers never felt comfortable working in a single team. This meant they had to come up with creative workarounds.

SCOPING SOLUTIONS

One job at a time

After mapping pain points in the user's collaboration journey,

I identified the jobs to be done at each step.

After mapping pain points in the user's collaboration journey, I identified the jobs to be done at each step.

As a developer, I want to join multiple teams

When a user is invited to a team, we could direct users to the quickest path by using the information we already had.

Akshayn

akshay.nkr@gmail.com

Dark-knight-Dev

apps@akshayn.com

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apps@akshayn.com

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Copy invite link

Waiting for them to join?

Make it easier for them by sending an invite link.

I want to switch between teams

After benchmarking other products, I quickly validated how different approaches would work on Postman.

Persistent team navigation

This makes switching super easy, but adds persistent noise taking away focus from the work.

Directory + Tabs

Other code editors allow users to multi-task across projects, but its risks overwhelming them.

Associating teams with account information allowed switching contexts when necessary while preventing distractions.

Users can access their account settings and profile from the header. Associating teams with account information allowed switching contexts when necessary while preventing distractions on the workspace.

I want to validate ideas before sharing

With a single team, users could create 'Personal Workspaces' that only they'd have access to. Once they join multiple teams, they needed a dedicated space for their personal work.

I want to share my personal workspace

In the first release, we could only allow sharing all workspaces with a team or none at all. I wanted the user to make an informed choice before they share them with a team.

I pitched an improved design soon after we launched, presenting evidence that customers were not happy sharing all their personal workspaces with a team.

Wins

2x ↑

Invite acceptance

30% ↑

Teams being created

650 ↑

New teams created

in 6 months

2x ↑

Activity among users

in multiple teams

Activity of users

in multiple teams

This was the foundation for solving problems such as 'Sharing workspaces with external collaborators' and 'Smart URLs'.