Case Study: Coursera achieves operational self-service and eliminates engineering bottlenecks with Postman

Postman Pro is the contract between operations and engineering at Coursera

Coursera, the online education platform serving 17+ million learners with 1,700+ courses and 140+ partners, was challenged by a massive proliferation of REST APIs across its service-oriented architecture. Rapid learner-side growth created frequent, time-sensitive partner updates that required engineers to manually assist operations—causing constant interruptions and risking a productivity drop. To address this, Coursera adopted Postman, using Postman Collections (and Postman Pro) as the tool to make APIs accessible to non-developers.

Postman Collections provided a simple GUI, documented endpoints, validation and internal auth controls so the operations team could self-serve partner content updates without engineering intervention. By making Collections the formal “contract” between front-end and back-end teams, Postman eliminated recurring handoffs, protected engineering productivity, and let Coursera’s 75-engineer development team support partners at scale across its large learner base and course catalog.

Coursera

Roshan Sumbaly

Engineering Lead