TL;DR
The Problem
For hourly workers, communication is rarely simple.
Messages are often scattered across third-party applications like WhatsApp groups, Facebook Messenger threads, texts, or generic workplace tools that were never designed for shift-based teams.
The Solution
Deputy set out to solve that problem by bringing real-time messaging directly into its workforce management platform.
The goal was not just to add chat, but to create a better communication layer for hourly teams: one that respected employee privacy, reflected who was actually on shift, and scaled across industries, regions, and business sizes.
To do that, Deputy partnered with Stream.
About Deputy
Deputy is a workforce management platform built for hourly workers. Its suite of products helps businesses manage scheduling, time and attendance, HR, payroll, and team communication in one place.
As Jordan Lewis, Senior Director of Product at Deputy, explains,
“Deputy is a global AI-powered workforce management platform focused on hourly workers, very different from the platforms that cater exclusively to knowledge workers that are out there. Our mission is to simplify shift work.”
Deputy serves customers across industries like retail, hospitality, manufacturing, services, and healthcare. Its customer base ranges from small businesses with 10 employees to enterprises with 10,000+ employees, across APAC, EMEA, and the Americas.
That broad footprint shaped the product requirements from day one. Deputy needed a messaging experience that could work globally, support mobile-first users, and feel native inside its existing application.
The Challenge: Shift Workers Need Something Better Than Consumer Apps
Before building messaging into Deputy, many customers relied on third-party messaging or general-purpose business tools to communicate with staff.
According to Lewis, the biggest alternatives were often informal channels:
“For smaller businesses, the main case is WhatsApp or the Facebook Messenger platforms. As you go up the size food chain and businesses get larger, we would see them using dedicated tools, whether it’s messaging platforms built for desk-bound knowledge workers, like Slack or Teams.”
But those tools created real friction for shift-based teams.
The primary issue was employee privacy. Workers often had to share personal phone numbers just to stay connected with managers and coworkers.
“Shift workers don’t really like giving their numbers out. All of a sudden, the whole business has your phone number or can contact you on WhatsApp, and now you are accessible to everyone.”
Another issue was operational control and user provisioning. Old employees often accidentally remain in off-platform chats long after they left the company, and managers have no easy way to structure communication based on role, location, or schedule.
Lewis describes the value of moving communication into Deputy this way:
“Now the conversation stays on the platform where your work already happens. There’s no need for your personal and work platforms to cross over.”
That shift gave Deputy customers something consumer tools could not: work communication tied directly to the work context.
Why Deputy Chose Stream
Deputy evaluated multiple vendors before selecting Stream. The team wanted a best-of-breed messaging platform that would accelerate time-to-market without forcing them to build core chat infrastructure from scratch.
Lewis says the decision started with product quality:
“The first thing we do is evaluate who's the best of breed and who can enable us to deliver value quickly and with quality to our customers. And that was Stream.”
Deputy also needed flexibility. The team wanted to use a mature SDK and infrastructure layer, while still customizing the experience so it looked and felt like Deputy.
“We were starting from a blank state and wanted a vendor who would give us the options not to have to build everything ourselves, but still be able to customize the experience so it looks and feels like the rest of the Deputy web and mobile product.”
Product fit was always the top priority, which Stream was able to demonstrate.
Building a Messaging Product for Shift-Based Work
Deputy partnered with Stream to build and launch its messaging product. The rollout followed a staged release process, moving from alpha to closed beta to open beta before general availability.
“We worked really closely with your team from day one. We’ve really enjoyed the shared Slack channel, and we’ve seen a really great response time from your team—asking questions, weekly check-ins, it was very collaborative.”
From the start of development to full general availability, the project took about nine months.
“Alpha was early Q1 last year (2025), and then by Q3 we were live… it was essentially a nine-month project from start coding to full GA.”
The team started with 2 engineers, grew to 8 during the build, then scaled back resourcing after launch. Lewis adds, “When you’re working across web, iOS, and Android, it takes a bit more resources to get that done.”
That model let Deputy invest heavily during implementation, then move the product into a more self-sustaining phase once it went live.
What Makes Deputy Messaging Different
Deputy’s messaging product is tightly integrated with the rest of the platform, enabling it to support use cases that generic dedicated messaging tools cannot.
A standout example is Deputy’s @onshift functionality, which lets managers message the people who are actively working at that moment rather than everyone in a channel. For example, teams can message people currently working a shift rather than notifying an entire channel.
As Lewis explains, “There’s no way that a WhatsApp or a Slack knows who’s working at that moment.”
That insight helped shape several of Deputy’s most differentiated messaging features. In addition to @onshift, the product can exclude employees who are on leave, automatically provision location-based groups, and restrict messaging by role or site, giving businesses much-needed control over who can communicate, when, and where.
“We went from thinking, ‘We’ll have an online presence indicator,’ to realizing that knowing who’s online actually doesn’t matter. In shift work, it matters if you are working or not. And if you’re not working, you shouldn’t be contacted.”
Lewis also points to other engagement-focused features that made the product more useful inside Deputy, including polls, Giphy, voice memos, and a Kudos feature tied to Deputy’s HR product.
“We have a Kudos feature, which enables team recognition. So to be able to bring that team engagement element to our messaging product has been awesome.”
Together, these features helped Deputy create a messaging experience tailored to frontline and distributed teams, rather than simply recreating a generic workplace chat tool inside its app.
Deputy also built messaging controls around real workforce structures, including locations, permissions, and employee roles. Businesses can restrict who can message whom, and employees can be automatically added to or removed from groups based on their work locations.
“Every location has that dynamic channel where users are added and removed automatically.”
The result is a messaging experience designed for the realities of hourly work, not adapted from a knowledge-worker use case.
Launching Free and Paid Messaging
Deputy introduced messaging with both free and paid tiers, making the feature broadly available while reserving advanced controls for larger or more complex businesses.
The free tier includes basics like one-to-one messaging, emojis, presence indicators, attachments, and limited message history. The paid tier adds read receipts, pinned messages, location-based smart groups, voice memos, and deeper permissions and automation.
Lewis explains the monetization strategy simply:
“We wanted every business to be using messaging. So price shouldn’t be the barrier, because the features were obviously worth the money from an ROI perspective.”
That product packaging also reflected the variety of Deputy’s customers. Smaller businesses could get immediate value from basic messaging, while enterprises benefited from the administrative controls, larger group support, and history they needed to manage communication at scale.
Early Adoption and Customer Feedback
Deputy tracks activation and engagement closely as the messaging product expands.
“The activation metric is simple: when a business has sent 10 or more messages across at least 3 users in the last 30 days. Once a business gets to that marker, we’re looking at the retention and continued message growth.”
Lewis says app adoption has broadened steadily, especially as companies moved from top-down communication into more organic, employee-driven messaging
One of the biggest themes in customer feedback was centralization, and another was privacy. Lewis adds, “Not requiring phone numbers has been a massive change to our org.”
Deputy also found that as the product matured, customers shaped its roadmap. Features like on-shift indicators were direct outcomes of real usage patterns and feedback during rollout, saying, “Those insights were golden.”
A Pragmatic Roadmap, Not Endless Catch-Up Work
One of the strongest signals for Deputy was what happened after launch: the team did not need to keep pouring engineering time into stabilizing or rescuing the product.
Lewis describes that as unusual in a good way:
“It’s rare to launch a product and in very quick succession go, ‘This is great. We can actually wind investments down and prioritize other things.’”
That did not mean the roadmap stopped. Deputy still sees opportunities ahead, including more advanced smart channels for role-based or tenure-based groups, and improved moderation functionality. But those features are enhancements, not blockers.
“The user growth is good. Feedback and customer satisfaction have been solid. So as a company, we’ve made a pragmatic decision.”
Today, Deputy’s messaging product delivers value without requiring a large, ongoing team to maintain it.
“It’s a sustainable product line now.”
Scaling Without Added Overhead
Looking ahead, Deputy’s goal for the Stream partnership is straightforward: scale usage.
Lewis elaborates, “Scale it. Double, triple the users that are on the platform.”
This has created a compelling business case internally. He adds:
“As a product lead, I now have a product line that could double or triple in usage without needing the same amount of Product, Design, and Engineering resources.”
That kind of leverage is exactly why many product teams choose API-based infrastructure over building chat systems themselves. Rather than dedicating years of engineering effort to real-time messaging, Deputy was able to launch faster, learn from customers, and then reallocate resources elsewhere.
Partnership Matters
Deputy’s experience with Stream was shaped not just by product capabilities, but by the responsiveness of the team behind it.
Lewis calls out the shared Slack channel and fast support loop as a standout part of the relationship, “Out of all of our partners, the response rate from you guys in our shared Slack channel is something we’ve all appreciated."
He also pointed to Stream’s flexibility in commercial discussions, especially as Deputy worked through how messaging usage should be measured against the way customers actually realized value.
“You understood that disparity in charge versus value, and you came to the table. So it was awesome.”
That willingness to take a long-term view helped reinforce Stream’s role as a strategic partner, not just a vendor.
“I think you’re taking a longer view of this partnership, which we really appreciate.”
Advice for Product Teams Evaluating Messaging Vendors
Lewis’s advice for teams building messaging into their product is to get very clear, very early, on where the platform ends and customization begins.
“Really understand what you get out of the box and what you need to customize yourself early on. And that will help you estimate.”
Even with a strong partner, that clarity matters for planning, resourcing, and timelines.
At the same time, Deputy’s overall takeaway was clear: Stream gave the team the infrastructure, support, and scalability they needed to bring messaging to market successfully. As Lewis puts it:
“I haven’t had to say to my CEO or my CPO that the reason we’re not going to achieve the results is limitations with Stream.”
And perhaps most powerfully:
“The ROI from our perspective is a no-brainer. Why would we build it ourselves? We’re getting everything we want at a price point that’s super reasonable and scalable as we grow year to year.”