The Herald Developer Portal
A developer-first experience for integrating, testing, debugging, and reporting.
Herald's API powers brokerages, SaaS platforms, and embedded insurance experiences to get quotes from multiple insurance carriers through a single integration. The business model relies heavily on activity sent through our API (where Herald earns a percentage of commission on policies) and SaaS fees that typically don't kick in until launch. This makes our integrations experience and developer experience a crucial aspect of Heralds product, with integration-time playing a massive role in our metrics.
API's are only as good as their documentation. As the leader of the Product team at Herald, I put a strong emphasis on our Developer Experience in 2024 by prioritizing a Developer Portal. This product was aimed at reducing our integration time, and increasing the quality of experiences our customers build.
Herald's users are developers, product managers, business analysts, underwriters, and brokers. Only one of those segments are fluent in understanding APIs. To educate the less technical stakeholders, I wanted to put a strong emphasis on abstracting away the API, and showing UI elements to explain what you could build first, and how you'd build it second. For each core endpoint Herald offered, I wanted to build an adjacent, fully interactive front-end product.
As an Aggregator of Insurance-APIs, our API is very complex. We have individual docs for highly specific use cases, and need want to surface them at the right time and place. By embedding JSON payloads next to front end components and documentation, we could guide people to the right guide as they look through an API request they created.
The Developer Portal offers an end-to-end front end "Request Builder", that allows you build an API request using a Front End application before diving into Postman. As you use the request builder, links to relevant documentation surface in real time based on your experience. Once you've gotten familiar with the core concepts and models of Herald's API, you can set up Webhooks, get API keys, configure the insurance Products you want access to, and create Producers in your system.
Active customers can view activity in Sandbox and Product environments, debugging errors and reviewing actual carrier-underwriting decisions. These real quotes can be cloned to test alternative scenarios, check another carriers appetite, or test different pricing.
All of these features are built on top of Herald's own API, which is referenced throughout the front end experience to guide Product Managers and Developers to build similar experiences themselves.
