Lightspeed reduces onboarding time and solidifies API governance with Postman

For a company with the size and reach of Lightspeed Commerce (teams across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific serve businesses in over 100 countries), the benefits of an API-first strategy are clear. Not only does it make it easier for developers from across the organization to collaborate, but it also provides a framework to expose previously internal functionality to partners with confidence. However, while the idea of an API-first strategy was clearly beneficial, in actuality Lightspeed found that making the move to API-first was challenging due to a lack of consistent API tooling, standards, and processes across their multiple development teams.

As the company began its API-first journey, one team in particular found itself at the forefront of these challenges. Working primarily with external partners, the Hospitality team needed a way to accelerate their API development cycle while improving quality; relying on legacy manual processes had led to slow and painful feedback cycles, an unclear path for onboarding new developers, and inconsistent quality.

With a shift to the Postman platform for the company's flagship product, as well as the goal of an API-first approach to development, the Hospitality team recognized that they needed to start by creating a single source of truth for their APIs.

Having worked previously with Postman, the team turned to Postman Collections as a way to both organize and distribute their various internal, partner, and public APIs. By supplementing their ad hoc group of OpenAPI specs with Postman Collections, they were able to provide an easy way for colleagues and invited partners to explore and work with their APIs. The move also laid the groundwork for the cultural and tooling shift required by the company's API-first strategy.

“The benefits of Postman are objectively clear. The collaboration tools, the testing tools, the mocking tools really speed up and standardize the entire API lifecycle.”

Michael Carey, Sr. Product Manager, API, Lightspeed

Building a Postman Collection for their APIs also opened the way for the team to use Postman's Collection Runner. Running queries against their APIs within Postman allowed the team to dramatically cut the delay between a developer creating new functionality and the product team validating its quality.

“Any time our developers are building new APIs, they're in Postman. That means I can see changes in real time and validate functionality against requirements immediately.”

Michael Carey, Sr. Product Manager, API, Lightspeed

Elsewhere in the company, teams are using Postman's API documentation tool to collaborate on and publish documentation for their APIs.

For the Hospitality team in particular, managing their APIs in Postman Collections has helped them achieve significant improvements in their API development process.

Faster onboarding for internal and partner developers

Onboarding new developers, whether internal to Lightspeed or from external partners, had historically been inconsistent and time-consuming.

With Postman acting as their single source of truth for APIs, developers can both discover and explore APIs within the team's collections independently. This has even improved the team's recruitment process by allowing candidates to get hands-on directly with the team's real APIs.

In total, leveraging Postman Collections has reduced the time it takes to onboard new developers by 20%.

“Postman makes it really easy to bring developers into our team workspace. We share a collection with them and they can be productive in much less time.”

Michael Carey, Sr. Product Manager, API, Lightspeed

Quicker feedback loops keep development focused

Working with Postman has also cut the time it takes to QA code. Postman Collections give the team's product manager immediate visibility into changes in real time. This enables testers and the product manager to independently validate new functionality against product specifications.

Similarly, the team can share APIs with partners to let them both track development and ensure that API functionality meets their expectations.

Overall, the Lightspeed team estimates a 30% reduction in the time it takes to test and validate new API functionality.

“With Postman, I can just log into my account, open a collection, and execute queries to validate that a new API matches what the partner and business have specified.”

Michael Carey, Sr. Product Manager, API, Lightspeed

Centralized API governance improves quality

In addition to improvements in onboarding, testing, and validation, Postman has also helped Lightspeed strengthen API governance across different teams. Easy access to APIs in one central location makes the company's API standards highly visible and provides easily accessible examples to developers starting new projects.

The Hospitality team plans to build on that success by integrating Postman into a new internal developer portal to include SDKs, Postman Collections, and test integration with the company's CI/CD pipeline. For Lightspeed Commerce, the Postman API Platform has given them the tooling and capabilities that they need to bring their API-first strategy to life.