PathaoTalk: how we moved a whole company off Workplace Chat in a month

In 2023, Pathao ran company chat on Facebook Workplace Chat. It worked for sending messages. It did not work for engineers.

What was wrong

• No markdown. You could not format anything. A bulleted incident update looked the same as a wall of text.
• No code snippets. Engineers pasted stack traces and SQL into chat all day, and they came out as unreadable blobs.
• No plugins or apps. We could not wire deploys, alerts or bots into the place where people were already talking.
• It cost thousands of dollars every month.

Developers did not enjoy using it, and you could feel it. Conversations moved to DMs and screenshots instead of channels people could search later.

The proposal I was not sure about

I suggested we move to Mattermost, self-hosted. It has markdown, code blocks, a plugin system and a real API. On paper it fixed every complaint.

I was honest that I was not confident we could pull it off. Chat is the one tool every person in the company uses every day. If the replacement is worse, even for a week, everyone notices.

The idea sat for a while. Then our CTO and one of my colleagues got interested and pushed it again. That mattered more than the proposal. An idea with one engineer behind it stays an idea. An idea the CTO wants gets a slot.

The prototype that settled it

The first real question was login. Nobody was going to accept another password. My colleague built a Google authentication prototype so people could sign in with the accounts they already had.

It worked. Once people could log in with one click, the project stopped being "should we" and became "what is left".

Closing the loose ends

What was left was a long list of small things, each of which could have killed adoption on its own:

• Authentication: taking the prototype to something we trusted for the whole company.
• Branding: we called it PathaoTalk. It looked like ours, not like a tool someone installed.
• Plugins and our own customizations for how Pathao teams actually worked.
• Push notifications, because a chat app that does not buzz your phone is not a chat app.
• Calling.
• The mobile app.

None of these were hard alone. Together they were the difference between "the engineers' chat" and "the company's chat".

A month later

Within about a month the whole organization had moved to PathaoTalk. Not only engineering: everyone.

Pathao still saves around $10K a month on communication because of it.

What I took from it

• Fix the complaint people feel every day. Nobody moved because of the invoice. They moved because code blocks and formatting made their day better. The savings were the business case; the features were the adoption plan.
• Prototype the scariest part first. Login was the riskiest piece. Once Google sign-in worked, every other item was just work.
• A proposal needs a sponsor. I had the idea and doubts. The CTO's push turned it into a project with time and attention.
• Adoption is the long tail. Push notifications, branding and the mobile app are not interesting engineering. They are what makes people stay.

If you are paying per seat for a chat tool your engineers do not like, a self-hosted Mattermost is worth a weekend prototype. Start with login.