POSTMAN BEST PRACTICES
Flows
Building quality APIs has never been more important. At Postman, we believe being API-first is the key to innovation in the AI era. We built Postman Best Practices to share the foundational ideas Postman is built on and enable you to do your best work.
The hardest part of working with APIs is rarely the endpoints themselves; it’s understanding how they work together. At Postman, we believe every member of your team, from the engineer building an API to the partner integrating with it, should be able to see and run API workflows without having to dig through scattered documentation or ask the workflow author.
This chapter shows you how to use Flows to turn complex API workflows into interactive, shareable artifacts and how to apply them across documentation, testing, collaboration, onboarding, and building APIs that AI agents can reliably consume.
Abhinav Asthana
Postman CEO and Co-founder
Ankit Sobti
Postman Field CTO and Co-founder
API development encompasses more than building and maintaining endpoints. Consumers—which today include developers, testers, partners, and AI agents—must be able to discover, understand, and integrate with those APIs reliably. Flows is designed to support that requirement.
Flows is built on top of collections. It provides a visual execution environment for composing API request sequences, transforming data, and modeling conditional workflow logic.
Flows capabilities
| Capability | Description | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Infinite Canvas | An unbounded workspace for designing and visualizing API workflows | Lets you freely arrange, zoom, and navigate complex workflows, without the constraints of a fixed viewport or rigid layout. This makes it practical to model both simple request chains and large, multi-step systems within a single shared canvas. |
| Modular Flows | Reusable workflow logic you can share across multiple Flows without duplicating or maintaining redundant scripts | Helps teams enforce consistency across workflows and reduces the overhead of keeping shared logic in sync as APIs evolve. |
| Grouping and Organization | Annotated canvas sections that create a guided, step-by-step walkthrough of your workflow logic | Simplifies and reduces the time it takes to onboard new team members or walk partners through how a workflow operates. |
| Live Embeds | Ability to share or embed a visual representation of your workflow directly into internal or external documentation | Gives API consumers a live, accurate view of how your APIs are structured without leaving their documentation context. |
| Test Scenarios | Ability to define and test a wide range of inputs without maintaining separate workflows | Enables you to use environmental variable values directly to validate behavior across conditions, as well as cover edge cases. |
| Run Logs | Ability to execute and trace visual workflows step by step, providing visibility into inputs, outputs, and state at every stage of execution | Makes it easier to debug failures, validate behavior, and understand how data moves through a workflow. |