Helen Tatum, Paypal

Thank you for tuning in to today’s TL;DR episode of the Breaking Changes podcast. I’m your host and Chief Evangelist for Postman, Kin Lane. With Breaking Changes we explore specific topics from the world of APIs, but we’re looking at it through the lens of business and engineering leadership. Joining me today we have Helen Tatum, Senior Product Manager for Developer Experience at PayPal. Helen shared with me her progressive views of what developer experience is about and how PayPal is investing in DX to help businesses with the digital resources and capabilities that they need to operate globally. Well, let’s start with the basics. Who are you and what do you do?

So I’m Helen Tatum, and I’m a Senior Product Manager at PayPal focused on the developer experience. And when I say that, I pretty much mean everything in a logged-out and logged-in state of developer.paypal.com. So if you go to that site you see our guides, you see our dashboard, you see our tools and resources, and that’s what I’m responsible for.

So why does developer experience matter?

Yeah, so I think one thing that we’ve experienced at PayPal is, we traditionally thought that developers were part of a merchant experience, in terms of the CFO or someone more in the finance or admin category of the company made the decisions on what type of payment solution they would select. And we’ve done a lot of research recently, and there’s also been a lot of larger studies done by Gartner, Stack Overflow, of course yours, and of course Postman and the API Evangelist as well, that have shown that the buying and decision-making power is shifting dramatically to the developer. And actually, the smaller the company, the more influence the developer has on what type of technology the company should use. Obviously every industry at this point is using technology, and so we’re seeing this across not just developer but broadly in the world, technology is integral to the success of a company regardless of their industry. And so that CTO org or that developer org is having much more of a seat at the table in what type of technology the company selects. And this is important for operational expense reasons, for profitability reasons, for scalability reasons, and then obviously in payments it’s extremely important for reliability, for compliance and regulatory reasons as well. So making sure that you go with the right payment solution for your use case is critical to the success of your business. And so one of the reasons why we’re really investing in the developer experience is to make sure that that decision-making process is easier, and the onus isn’t on the developer to make all of these decisions all at once, but we’re giving them the information that they need at the time that they need it to make the right decision for their company.

Yeah, it’s very important. I would say developers have more of the domain expertise to be able to make decisions, but would you say that we need more business stakeholders involved in being API-aware? Should everybody have some API awareness at a company?

Obviously that somewhat depends on the company. So if you are Twilio, you all probably should have some knowledge of that. If your company is API-first and the backbone of the value-add and business model is an API, then I would hope so. But broadly speaking, I would say that, I believe I read that the average age of a developer is 33 in the US and it’s as young as 17 in Australia, and so you’re just kind of growing up with it in the industry these days, and so you happen to have that knowledge because it’s important. I think back to, I’ll date myself, but pre-2000s I would do computer class and it would just be typing, and that would be the extent of what we needed to know, and now students are coding frankly probably better than me at this point, just to get by in a basic class. So I just think the democratization of being a developer and having a coding skill set is rapidly increasing.

Agreed, and I think the digital literacy required of the average worker is expanding, and it’s much beyond just software and applications, it’s interoperability, connecting multiple services and solutions together. So how do you quantify success when it comes to developer experience? How do you know if what you’re doing is working and having the desired impact?

Yeah, and I think for developer it’s particularly challenging, because you could look at things as a positive and a negative specifically when it comes to KPIs and metrics. Because your goal is to give people the information that they need in the shortest amount of time possible, and so if they get that information then they could be completely satisfied with that page, and that could result in a quote-unquote high bounce rate, because they’ve quickly looked at it and they’ve seen the page and they’ve moved on and gotten their question answered. They’re satisfied in that situation, but it reflects potentially poorly on your experience. And so I think that, different than some of the social companies where engagement is really key, it’s not necessarily an important thing in developer, or it can be in certain instances, but it’s very nuanced. And so that’s something that I think we’ve uncovered through research and just the experience of being on the team for a couple of years and building out the analytical foundation. But I would say in my opinion what success is for a developer experience is, you can do an integration completely self-service. So for PayPal, we’re starting to measure our JS SDK integration, which is our basic standard PayPal Checkout that you see on any e-commerce website when you’re checking out, start to finish, signing up for a developer account, playing around with that code, customizing it to your liking, and then ultimately sandbox and going live within 15 minutes. So that’s our benchmark right now that we’re working towards. But when you’re browsing or when you’re looking at support, it’s somewhat of a different metric for success, because you actually want to get in and out as fast as possible. And we’ve done some research with developers that are either third-party contractors via like Upwork or other consulting platforms, or you’re just in a developer firm and you’re hired as a consultant, and what their real need is, is they want an experience to save them time. So saving them time means faster experiences, and which also means getting them the information that they need as quickly as possible. So in those instances, time is an important metric, but also that might show up in a different way on the company’s metrics.

For example, is the phrase developer experience going to take us into the future when a lot of this is low-code or no-code? Is developer the right word that we want to be using? Do you think we should go broader, or do you think what is a developer is going to change?

Yeah, that’s a great question, and I recall one of the senior folks at PayPal and I chatting when I first joined about, I was trying to learn what their vision of success was, and he said even the word developer is so antiquated. And so I actually agree. I think that PayPal runs the gamut of our customers in terms of size, and so at a large enterprise company, developer even, it might be, I have a friend who works for a commercial real estate firm and she’s literally in the IT division and she’s doing Salesforce. So it really depends on how they call it, what they call it, but in the industry I think you’re just tech savvy, that’s kind of what I’ve been referring to it as. Because especially in COVID, when you see all of these millennials or Gen Z kind of trying to do good by offering masks on Etsy or Shopify, or even coding a website themselves to do it, they’re not like a quote-unquote certified developer, but they’re a tech savvy merchant. And so that’s kind of the nuance that I’ve tried to bring to the terminology. But I think the longer that we have the democratization of all this coding, it won’t even be a thing, it’s like asking my parents if they understand Gmail.

Yeah, this is where the success is going to be next. I think Stripe, Twilio, even PayPal’s had success in the direct API kind of, here’s a resource, payment, invoicing, here’s a resource, use it, build and innovate and do things. But I think more so, as this moves beyond just core developer circles, it has to speak to business needs and solving business problems, and then, as you said earlier on, fit into an overall business strategy, and knowing your customers, having a healthy bottom line, reducing fraud. So there’s a bigger picture, and that’s what I feel like, correct me if I’m wrong, that’s PayPal’s positioning, is, yeah, we’ve got the individual resources for payments and invoicing, but as part of this larger mosaic, and we’re going to help you be a better business and solve real-world problems as part of it.

Totally. So I don’t even really like when people compare us to Stripe, Adyen, whoever, Plaid even, because we’re just fundamentally a different business, it’s apples to oranges. We got our success through the consumer division, people then trusted PayPal, we were a first mover in the space. We just did a market research study where our number one perception in the market is secure, reliable, and trustworthy, and that’s because we’ve been around since 1999. And so we grew our merchant division out of a need, similar to how Amazon grew AWS, we grew our merchant division frankly fairly organically, and then the developer division grew organically out of merchant. And we’re kind of a one-stop shop for your financial needs. And what I think is interesting is, I just talked about how developer is different than merchant, which it is, but it could be the same person, that’s a consumer that owns a small business and is tech savvy, imagine being able to connect all of your financials in one space with that.

Yeah, and I think the API story is, you got these individual resources that you can use as you need, tailor and make seamless, but it’s still someone who’s going to be paying attention to that bigger-picture strategy and how the puzzle goes together, not just the individual pieces of the puzzle. APIs for me, it’s got to have business value, it’s got to have meaning and purpose in our average daily lives, otherwise it just doesn’t matter. There’s so many tech for the sake of tech, APIs for the sake of APIs, it’s got to, the rubber’s got to meet the road, and that’s kind of the differentiator right now between APIs, is it’s got to solve my real-world business problems. So speaking to that as part of your developer experience, speaking to that as part of your overall narrative, I think is pretty essential to the game.

Yeah, definitely. And I think one thing that we’ve really focused on at PayPal is trying to improve our documentation, because that is key, and understanding, to your point, the business need and the value-add and the use case, and using coding examples to show the use case. So don’t just talk about it, show it. And so that’s been something that we’ve really focused on and invested in, that’s something that we’re looking to do a lot of in the future and that we’ve already started. So things that our developers have said they really care about are language-specific guides, open source style documentation, compelling use cases with examples, specifically copy-and-paste examples so it’s easy for them, and then videos, so YouTube tutorials, links to other developer communities. I’ll never forget, I started this journey at PayPal in June 2020, so during COVID, so funnily enough I’ve actually never been in an office. I wanted us to understand who our merchant, who our developers were, and we didn’t have a ton of that information, so I launched a survey with Qualtrics that we have embedded on our site, and we got I think 15,000 responses within one month, and that month was over the holidays too, it was over Christmas and New Year’s. So you would argue that that’s probably, maybe that wasn’t strategically smart, but that was what we did. And I remember showing the results to our marketing team, and they were so jealous that that was the kind of ROI and the engagement. And there’s plenty of studies that show too that developers want to talk and want to help each other out, and one of the reasons why, what I think is a self-service integration is our real North Star, and what we think is a good developer experience, is that also includes being able to engage with your community. Developers have actually said they want to just chat with someone via web chat tools, or being able to have other developers from the community answer their questions. So we’ve since hired an entire developer relations organization, which consists of really senior design, developers, and engineers at PayPal that help monitor our sites, help provide coding examples, update everything, create YouTube videos. So we’re really trying to meet our audience where they are so that they can get their questions answered as fast as possible.

Do you have a feedback loop in place to continue iterating on that content and evolve it to keep it meeting their needs?

Yeah, we do. It’s constant, frankly. It is challenging too, because developers love to talk and love to provide feedback, you actually get a lot of feedback. And internally too, so whenever I launch a product I always do a beta staging link so that internal employees can, I frankly get better QA testing from that. So I distribute it out anywhere from two weeks to a month out depending on the product, but the amount of feedback that I got, I create an entire epic in Jira and have engineers just put feedback in there, and I ask them to categorize it, bug versus improvement, and the amount of improvement requests that I get is overwhelming, and it’s incredible because you’re just crowdsourcing great ideas. But it does create, that’s where kind of my role comes in, is what’s the most important burning problem right now and how to prioritize the improvement. Because frankly, if we could, I would do all of it as soon as possible, but that’s just not the reality.

Well, I really appreciate you being here today and joining me for this conversation.

Yeah, thank you so much for your time, and also just for your interest in PayPal and helping be a platform for us to make our experience better, we’re really grateful.

Yeah, I’m really inspired by you all’s approach to developer experience, I think it’s some of the more tangible, meaningful, and useful real-world applied approach that I’ve seen out of an API provider, so I’m enjoying it.

Good, good. Well, hopefully you’ll see more to come, and we’re just getting started.

Excellent. Well, thanks for joining me today, and enjoy the rest of your week, and look forward to working with you more.

Yeah, you as well, thank you so much for everything you do, I love your podcast and I’m a religious listener, so excited to continue listening.

Thanks again to Helen for stopping by. You can find more about PayPal at paypal.com, and you can find Helen on LinkedIn. You can subscribe to the Breaking Changes podcast at postman.com/events/breaking-changes. I’m your host, Kin Lane, and until next time, cheers.