From Zero to Hero: How the Postman Leaders Program Sparked a Journey from Delivering World Class Products to Winning Hackathons and Building AI Agent Solutions
Earlier this year, my good friend and colleague, Karen Bajza-Terlouw, introduced me to Patricia Dugan, her counterpart as Community Manager at Postman. Karen and Patricia asked if I’d consider joining the 2025 Postman Leaders group, as I had recently added the PayPal Public Postman collection to my product portfolio. As a longtime fan of Postman, I was honored to be considered and gladly accepted the opportunity.
Since then, I’ve been working closely with the Postman team in this new role. I’ve built strong friendships with Patricia, Deepa Goyal—a truly impressive product leader—and many other wonderful folks at Postman. Deepa and I have had nearly weekly sessions, collaborating on demos, Postman Flows, and even engaging in some visionary, big-picture discussions that have been quite fun. These collaborations have deepened my appreciation for Postman’s powerful tools and their value for developers. Inspired by these experiences, I’m even more motivated to bring greater value to PayPal developers through Postman.
In mid-April, we launched a major update to the PayPal Public API workspace. Among many other things, this update introduced a new, use-case-based Postman Flow that shows how to use the PayPal Orders, Vault, and Payments APIs to set up recurring payments.
This Flow was planned and built by a team of PMs and engineers at PayPal, including Yeshvi Nagaich, the PM for the Vault API and Adnan Prcic, the PM for the Orders API. It was intended to be featured in a talk by my colleague Aaron Szerlip at our PayPal Developer Days conference, with the added bonus of being available to attendees after the talk. The session was a big success, with attendees praising the Postman Flow visuals and the hands-on demo, which taught them valuable insights about PayPal APIs.
The day after Aaron’s talk, I found myself in the Hackathon room, an event organized and run by Karen. The participants had about 90 minutes left to complete their projects and submit them for judging. As one of the few PayPal folks present, two developers, Jordi Montes and Neeraj Jhawar, approached me with a question about our Vault API. Although I wasn’t fully familiar with the API’s specifics at the time, I was happy to help.
To my surprise, the question they had was exactly the same as the one Aaron had demonstrated earlier that morning. I couldn’t contain my excitement: “We just demoed this exact thing this morning! There’s a Postman Flow available that you can fork and use right now!”
Without hesitation, Jordi launched Postman, quickly created an account, and forked the collection and Flow. I walked him through the Flow diagram, showing him how to sequence the APIs and pass data seamlessly from one API call to the next. We then took a quick look at the request bodies, so he could understand exactly how to configure the requests—first, to vault a payment method, and then how to use that vault ID for subsequent payments.
In less than 10 minutes, they were up and running with the APIs they needed for their project. As a product manager, I couldn’t have been more delighted to see how quickly something we shipped helped developers integrate our APIs, all thanks to Postman’s intuitive tooling.
On the final day of the event, the judges announced the hackathon winners. And guess what? Jordi and Neeraj—whom we had helped just the day before—won FIRST PRIZE! They built a super cool CrawlerPal that enables bots to pay for access when confronting paywalls. To quote Jordi, “Just like a human paywall checkout, but for agents.”
Of course, this success story wasn’t mine alone. I’m just one small part of the larger effort that made it all happen. This is a testament to the power of community and collaboration across people, teams, and products: from the incredible work of community managers Karen and Patricia to my sessions with Deepa, to Postman’s amazing features, to PayPal’s powerful APIs, to Aaron’s insightful demo, and the great value of the PayPal Public Postman Collection.
After the hackathon awards ceremony, I had the pleasure of introducing Jordi to all the Postman and PayPal PMs who helped make his success possible. We all agreed—it couldn’t have played out better than it did for everyone involved.
If you’d like to create your own winning success story like this, follow our workspace updates in Postman to keep an eye on future PayPal developments.