We have customers in 100+ countries. Teams in just 2. We are changing that.

tl:dr;

Great 2018; fast growth with the right culture and systems; hiring fast and hiring remote!

Why is 2018 a great year?

While I could say that every year has been an amazing year for Postman, I have been blown away by what our team has achieved in 2018 with a lot of time still to go. We grew a lot in terms of our users, customers, and people. We also matured as a company. The middle stage of a startup's growth is often tricky. From an overabundance of advice for early stage companies, startups find themselves in new territory - from having to listen to customers instead of validating the MVP, hiring senior management, building a coherent long term vision and more. On top of that, there is the romantic charm of operating like a "startup" - which often means operational chaos. At Postman, we solved these and then some more of these "good problems to have", doubling in size and growing to more than 75 people. We expect to double again in the next 6-9 months.

Through this critical growth phase, I am incredibly proud of my team who delivered week after week towards building a platform for modern software.

We expanded our product. A lot.

In the beginning of the year, we transitioned from Postman - the REST Client to Postman, the API Development Environment. This marked the beginning of clarifying our messaging to our community on what all Postman can do for them. We also launched Workspaces - allowing teams collaborate on Postman faster. Workspaces have been adopted rapidly by our customers. Some of them have the entire company - Developers, QA, DevOps, Product Managers and more - working together on one platform using Postman. To help everyone see the power of Workspaces, a few weeks back, we made the feature free for a limited usage amount. Every day thousands of teams are adopting workspaces to accelerate their API development processes.

Along with this there were hundreds of bug fixes and improvements to our products. We ship something new to production almost every day now and our goal is to go even faster.

All of this is driven by community feedback through several channels: Github, Discourse, Twitter and more. We offer free support to our entire community and we directly feed this info into our product roadmap. 95% of our roadmap is driven by community feedback. Of course, we keep a point of view of the product and what the solutions should be. We have found out that the community appreciates it and helps us take the lead when there can be many competing voices.

This was something we experienced in the physical world at our first ever conference: POST/CON in San Francisco this year. I was of course a bit nervous about hosting a big event but well, we sold out of tickets fast! We had a great event with a great set of speakers. POST/CON next year will be even bigger and more exciting!

We doubled our office space and our headcount.

Not just numbers, our office space requirements have kept on growing continuously. Well, we doubled headcount in the middle of this year alone. We expanded into our awesome new space in San Francisco and doubled our office space size in Bangalore.

How we managed this without chaos?

How did we manage our growth while expanding fast? Introducing the term "management" in a start-up is tricky. It can mean the loss of excitement, the slowing down of momentum, and process as proxy for progress.

To avoid these and wanting to scale. starting with my co-founders, I thought a lot about how we operate. We introduced several changes at key points in our systems while ensuring that our culture is intact. I'll write about these separately but a short list is below:

1. Separating our engineering teams into Product, Services, Platform functions. Each function has several semi-autonomous teams with clear dependency maps.
2. Instrumented our platform to reduce deployment times.
3. Adopted a maturity model to measure these: quality, agility, resilience, availability, performance and security.
4. Moved our product development planning on Aha.
5. Evolved our culture code into company-wide values to be more inclusive and more applicable.
6. Adopted Medium's Growth Framework to invest in growth of our engineers. We are working on customizing the framework for other teams now.
7. Established clear interfaces between our Go-To-Market teams: Marketing, Customer Success, and Developer Relations.

But this is not enough!

All of this has led to our users and customers pushing us even faster. Postman is used in almost every country on the planet and we have customers in more than 100 countries. So much so that, thousands of companies across the globe are hiring today with Postman experience.

As we estimated the work that is ahead of us, we estimated that we have to get more people on our mission and even double headcount in the next 12 months - maybe even faster. We started wondering why are we constraining ourselves to hiring in 2 countries - US and India - when our users and customers are across the globe. We are hiring across the board for more than 30 positions and from today onwards, we have decided to open remote positions as well!

Why do we think this can work?

While building our culture across two offices almost simultaneously and wanting to have people collaborate with each other - we realized that we already have the core aspects of making remote work work.

1. We write everything down - Confluence, Slack (meeting notes), Postman, API documentation, RFCs, Roadmaps
2. We do stand-ups with meeting notes for the whole company to see.
3. We pipe all user feedback to Slack channels for faster response from everyone in the team.
4. We do weekly demo days to share and collaborate early and often - one in Bangalore and one in San Francisco to cover for the time zone difference.
5. We hire for the best talent wherever available rather than labelling our office as a dev office or a sales office.
6. We sponsor all expense paid trips for our employees in both offices for work visits.
7. We started onboarding better with clear written down checklists.

All of this started clicking together this year with our team hitting targets with a cadence of a professional sports team.

I am super excited about what the team has achieved so far. There is a long way to go still and we have more to learn on the way. If you believe this is appealing to you, we'd love to have you on this journey with us. If you know someone who'd like to be part of Postman, forward this along or message me on LinkedIn. If you want to know more about our culture check out the video below: