Conversations is our excellent chat product. It features a searchable real-time inventory, internal messaging, video messaging, SMS, custom incentives, YouTube integration, manufacturers’ PDF brochures, and a payment calculator; all together in one place for your team.
On a daily basis, we’re focused on thoughtful iteration that continues pushing us toward innovation.
We recently started the transition of Conversations from a single-purpose application with direct database access into an API-driven solution. Our custom API gives us the power and scalability to run the existing desktop experience, native mobile apps, dealer groups, and a managed chat interface for call centers.
Our development team is fully remote, so–even though we’re constantly messaging each other in Slack–any ambiguity in the design of the API or throughout the testing scenarios is slightly amplified. With this in mind, James, our VP of Engineering, turned to Postman.
Postman is software that allows us to build API calls, gather them together into collections, and share a common collection library across the entire team. That last bit is part of Postman Cloud, which is an upgrade that is well worth the cost. In addition to Postman’s call builder, the organization of calls into collections has eliminated a huge amount of potentially wasted time. For more complex scenarios, we’re also able to chain together multiple calls within test suites.
When Postman was rolled out to the team, we included directory structure, but only built out the calls within one or two of those folders. The entire team then made real-time contributions to the library in order to build it out to its full set. In addition to decentralizing the work of creating our library, those real-time updates continually force the team to all be on the same page and create solutions together–collaboratively, from the perspective of API creators and API consumers.
Overall, we’ve found Postman to be incredibly valuable in giving an interactive interface to our API, and in sharing route definitions to avoid duplicating effort by recreating them.
