From the Desk of the CPO: 2023 Product Roadmap

Over a billion end users rely on our chat and feeds products, thanks to the thousands of companies that have chosen Stream.

Marcelino M.
Marcelino M.
Published April 3, 2023
From the Desk of the CPO

In 2022, we set a record for the number of new customers we get to serve, and I want to express my sincere gratitude for your trust in us.

We are thrilled with our progress thus far, and it motivates us to continue growing and enhancing our products and services to support the success of your business.

This blog post outlines our product roadmap for 2023. Customer feedback is essential to iterate and improve, so please share your thoughts by sending a quick email to product@getstream.io.

Chat

Our chat SDK helps you build feature-rich, in-app chat for your application in days and scale to support millions of users. As we look ahead to 2023, we're excited to announce that we'll be investing in the following areas:

  • Expanding our out-of-the-box support for various message types, including asynchronous voice messages, pending messages, draft messages, polls, and system messages.
  • Introducing the Campaigns solution, which will allow customers to broadcast messages to users automatically.
  • Improving our Dashboard Analytics capabilities is one of our main requests, and in 2023, we will be delivering many improvements in this area.
  • Enhancing the user experience within our dashboard to accommodate new functionalities while maintaining simplicity and ease of use.
  • And making other improvements based on your feedback, such as upgrading how threads and unread counts are handled, adding more flexibility into the already powerful query channels capability, and refining push notifications monitoring and debugging, among others.

Activity Feeds

Activity Feeds were our first product. It excels in scalability, supporting hundreds of millions of users. Large apps like eToro, Soundcloud, PayTM, and Dana use our activity feed technology. Jimmy Pettersson recently joined Stream to head up our Feeds engineering team.

Under Jimmy's leadership, we plan to make the following investments throughout 2023:

  • We are taking everything we've learned about video and chat and are applying it to feeds to make the product easier to use. This includes the permission layer, updated client-side SDKs, and convenient-to-use GDPR endpoints.
  • We will implement a more consistent push notification solution across all our products, leveraging our work on chat.
  • We will support modern client SDKs and UI components for notification feeds. However, the design of an activity feed tends to diverge widely between apps. Since only a small portion of our customers can leverage the activity feed UI components, we will put less emphasis on UI components for feeds.

Live Video

Over the last few years, our customers have frequently asked for video/audio calling capabilities. We've been testing our video product for several months and will launch a public beta in Q2.

Stream's video API will enable users to quickly build audio rooms, video calls, and livestreams. Calls will run on Stream's global edge network of servers for optimal quality, latency, and reliability. The SDKs automatically adjust quality and codecs so that users can reduce their time to market and effortlessly scale large calls.

Three use cases for video and audio

If you want to subscribe to the Early Access Program and receive perks and discounts, please register here.

Auto Moderation

Our AI-based moderation product, launched in 2022 with CSpam and Platform Circumvention, continues to evolve to support new engines. We've recently launched Intent Designer, which allows intents to be designed through configurations, not code.

While Auto Moderation is currently a chat add-on, we are developing the Moderation API that will allow AI Moderation to operate on top of any existing solution that handles text messaging.

Please don't hesitate to contact us to learn more about how Auto moderation can help your business.

The Trend Towards App Components

Components enable you to focus on what makes your app unique. Stream empowers engineering teams to create the best user experience faster and at a lower cost than building in-house. Given the current market conditions, we see the need for components to accelerate innovation to gain that competitive edge.

There are a couple of values that we strive for with all of our components & products:

  • To provide engineering teams with Modern SDKs that are enjoyable and easy to use
  • To emphasize reusability and flexibility to build any type of functionality. We don't want to limit what you can create!
  • To instill trust that apps powered by Stream can scale to hundreds of millions of users to support our largest customers

2023 and Onward

This blog post shares the current version of our roadmap, and we're actively listening to our customers to iterate on it. I'd love to learn more about how you're using Stream and how we can improve the product. Any feedback regarding the API, SDKs, or even the docs is appreciated. Just send a quick email to product@getstream.io. I look forward to hearing from you!