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Product management is one of the most effective strategies you have for building better products in the new year. Learn more in the article! What drives innovation? That question plagues product teams and product-driven organizations in every market. And the answer is never as st…

Messaging, whether it be through SMS/MMS text messages, email, or a messaging app, is a core way humans communicate with each other worldwide. According to CTIA, a trade association for the U.S. wireless communications industry, Americans sent 2.1 trillion SMS text messages in 20…

SDK Updates & New UI Components 2021 is off to an exciting start here at Stream — we’ve been busy incorporating your feedback to provide the best Stream Chat experience possible. We think you’ll love building with our newly-reworked chat SDKs for Android and iOS, with major impro…

People interact with your brand across a number of different channels—each one its own unique kind of experience. As channel preferences shift and evolve, the customer journey gets more complex. To refine that experience, you need to adopt a customer lifecycle management strategy…

What drives customers to make a purchase? Is it their perception of your product’s value, your marketing and branding, your price? Or is there more to it than that? More than any other factor, convincing someone to hand over their hard-earned income is a matter of trust. And acco…

It’s a difficult statistic to read: 70% of upstart tech companies fail. There are many reasons why tech companies shutter their doors, ranging from mismanagement to lack of funds. Sometimes, tech failures are inevitable. But having a great product that serves the unique needs of …

Photo: Pixar Whether you are presenting your three-year product vision to investors or writing a product requirement document (PRD) for your company’s engineering team, a significant part of a product manager’s role is outlining the “what,” “why,” “how,” and “so what?” of product…

According to a 2019 Roadmap.com survey, 50.3% of product managers think their company’s overall strategy lacks clarity. Which makes sense — top-down directives, even those with merit, are often too nebulous to provide the kind of guidance teams need to drive results. So, how do y…

Timing is everything. When you spend so much time conceptualizing, planning, and building new products for your customers, nailing the launch date is crucial. Release too early, and your product might not be ready for full customer engagement; release it too late, and someone els…

Learning management systems are a type of education technology designed to enable educators to organize and distribute curriculum and coursework. Increasingly more school systems, teachers, universities, students, and parents use learning management systems (LMS) and similar plat…

A chat app generates many events throughout the day. Messages are sent and deleted, channels are created, users join them, and so on. Sometimes, it’s essential to respond to these events automatically, for example, by triggering a bot message, billing a credit card, or calling a …

As the landscape of virtual events evolves, organizers of trade shows, conferences, expositions, summits, keynotes, fundraising events, and even wedding planners grapple with choosing the best virtual event platform for their specific use case. Also called online venues, virtual …

We are happy to announce the public v1.0 release of our React Native SDK for Activity Feeds. This release provides support for the latest Expo 40 and React Native 0.63. Quick links React Native Activity Feeds Tutorial Activity Feed Mobile App Highlights We decided to move away fr…

Talking finance with a robot is about as complicated as it sounds — unlike the basic live chat experience you might find on a retail website, a good fintech chatbot requires advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology for both conversation (natural language p…

Quoted replies is a useful feature when you want to reply to a specific message in 1:1 chats or when you want to quote someone on your replies in group chats. The ability to quote and reply to specific messages in a conversation makes it easier to keep track of things, especially…

To understand the future of technology in education, we need to know what’s happening now. We’ve seen recent changes in the industry that seem to be paving the way for a new wave of online learning for entrepreneurs, developers, instructors, and learners alike. A deep dive into t…

Today’s internet landscape is practically unrecognizable compared to the 1990s, when AOL, MSN, GeoCities, Hotmail, and other long-gone services reigned supreme. But if you look underneath modern user experiences and the compact, high-tech devices that deliver them, you might be s…

When you have important messages that you want to be able to see quickly, you can use the pinned messages feature. Pinned messages are flagged as special and can be set up so that you see them at the top of your folder, channel, conversation, etc. Pinned messages are used to shar…

A great customer experience is what sets your company apart — it can increase customer satisfaction, retention rates, and the potential for upsells. A bad experience can spell disaster for your company’s bottom line. And those experiences are tied directly to how consumers intera…

According to a 2018 survey by PMI, approximately 52% of projects are completed on time. When you don’t deliver on time, you lose out on any potential revenue that could be gained from a new product. If time and scope creep have a negative impact on your bottom line, why do so man…

Learning management systems (LMS) are edtech tools designed to organize, store, and distribute online curriculum content to learners. They are extensively used by schools, teachers, administrators, universities, online education websites, and students to organize classwork and tr…

When Macromedia launched the Real-Time Messaging Protocol in the 1990s as the backbone of Flash, it established what would become the near-universal standard for multimedia streaming over the internet for more than 20 years. And although newer protocols like HLS and MPEG-DASH are…

Few industries experienced such recent meteoric growth as virtual events. Defined as an organized meet-up that takes place online rather than in a physical location, virtual events are a vital tool for event organizers in 2021 and beyond. According to a report by the Professional…

Message Markup Language (MML) enables you to build an interactive message experience. MML supports embedding elements as simple as a button to your message or as complex as date pickers and custom forms within your chat experience. MML also supports images, icons, and tables out …

Live chat solutions have proven themselves key to boosting engagement, sales, and satisfaction across industries as diverse as retail ecommerce and B2B software. They help companies of all sizes extend their sales and support teams’ capacity to provide personalized assistance in …

Children are going online earlier in life than ever. While they may be able to effortlessly drag, drop, and post updates on social networking sites, they haven’t yet acquired the emotional maturity to use the internet mindfully. Technological ability without wisdom is one reason …

The software development process is often long and always complex. Efficient delivery of value to your customers depends on a backbone of internal infrastructure your team uses. With so much complexity to contend with, it’s no surprise that 21.1% of respondents in a 2019 Stack Ov…

Reactions are a fun way to interact in chat apps quickly and are featured in almost all of them. However, some apps handle reactions slightly differently than others. For example, Slack allows a user to add several different reactions to a message. On the other hand, iMessage onl…

The core subjects of mathematics, science, English, and history are critical to academic success. However, many institutions fail to teach essential skills for career development, such as effective email and video chat communication, managing client relations, and more. Danny Rub…

Tech stack decisions are unique to each edtech solution, and it is up to product managers and developers to understand their specific requirements. Leveraging technology providers to support app development and user growth is key to building a scalable, reliable, and cost-effecti…

Delivering continual value to customers is the key to a winning product experience. But when there’s so much that goes into building these experiences, how do you make it easier for your team to create that value at scale? This question is a crucial part of what makes the build v…

There are a lot of ways your product can fail. When your job as a product owner is to ensure that doesn’t happen, it’s important to verify that every part of your organization understands product development inside and out. That understanding is the key to creating a winning prod…

According to a 2018 Stack Overflow survey, 85.4% of respondents said they use some form of the agile methodology to keep their teams on track. But what does it mean to be agile? There are a number of different frameworks, techniques, and processes that make up the agile methodolo…

When building a chat application, real-time events are crucial to providing an engaging user experience and adding custom functionality or behaviors specific to your use-case. With Stream Chat webhooks, you can provide endpoints on your server to receive events as they happen, al…

To put it mildly, higher education institutions contend with many moving parts. With hundreds of faculty members, thousands of students, and many millions of dollars at stake, systems, and procedures can become complicated and confusing, sometimes dimming the experience for those…

Not all chat apps are the same. Some may need interactions other than the regular sending of messages, reactions, typing indicators, etc. Delivery apps, for example, may require a "delivery completed" event. Dating apps, a "match" event. That is why you must use an underlying cha…

Not long ago, it was common for businesses to develop their own proprietary software solutions. Even companies whose core product or service wasn’t software would write their own programs — retail chains built point of sale and inventory management systems, for example, and hospi…

In most chat apps, it’s essential to be able to tell the difference between users. Though the user ids are always different, by default Stream Chat allows users to have the same name for display. This can be an issue since a user could impersonate another or choose the same name …

A chat app generates a lot of data based on user interactions. In some cases, such as when you need to provide chat transcripts of a livestream event to the event organizer, it’s essential to have easy access to that data in a flexible format. You can then transform the data into…

Follow these tips to create a user-friendly live chat experience that drives customer satisfaction without feeling intrusive.

If edtech tools were important to school systems and educators before 2020, they are now essential to engage students in remote or hybrid learning models. A new era of technology-dependent education calls for improved solutions to manage exponential user growth. This guide is a c…

For nearly two decades, Stephen Green has played a major role in reimagining the scope and direction of higher education among U.S. colleges and universities. Green currently serves as Chief Program Officer at Noodle Partners, the country’s leading provider of online program mana…

It’s common in chat apps to encounter users who engage in disruptive behavior such as trolling or even scamming, especially as the chat community grows in user count. Stream Chat already provides many moderation tools to help you deal with these problematic users in specific ways…

Even before you enjoy your morning cup of coffee, apps likely influence your day. From guided meditation (cue the soothing voice of Headspace’s Andy Puddicombe) to incrementally learning how to speak Spanish, modern life is tightly intertwined with apps. They have the potential t…

Telemedicine app usage is exploding as patients seek new ways to connect with healthcare providers and have fewer in-person visits with doctors. Current events have accelerated telemedicine’s growth, and there’s good reason to believe the technology is here to stay and will conti…

If you’ve ever taken an entry-level course at a public university, you know lectures can contain upwards of 500 students, making it next to impossible to get one-on-one time with your professor. Recognizing the communication challenges in higher education, entrepreneur Tade Oyeri…

What if we told you there was a way to do more with less? Sounds suspect, but for product teams, resource and time management are a vital part of the process. Lean product development is built on the idea that reducing waste is the key to building high-quality products faster. Le…

In-app chat has quietly revolutionized the way users communicate. Chat is now integral to daily life, building communities, connecting patients with doctors, selling products, solving customers’ problems, helping fans rally around their teams, and giving students the tools they n…

We tend to think of a product launch as the end of the development process. But the product development life cycle doesn’t end with the release. Once your new product or feature is on the market, there’s still a lot of work to do. Markets mature and your customers’ needs change —…

Releasing a new product or feature to market is a big deal. That single event is the culmination of a significant amount of work across every part of your team. With so much riding on that initial product experience, why are 45% of product launches delayed by at least a month, ac…