React Chat SDK for Rich Real-Time Communication

Product challenge

Give product teams a faster, lower-risk way to add rich real-time chat to React applications without rebuilding messaging state, responsive behavior, or integration tooling themselves.

Product and engineering approach

• Treated developer adoption as part of the product, not an afterthought: structured the SDK as a TypeScript monorepo, separated reusable packages, and documented components and states in Storybook.
• Built the real-time interaction layer with WebSockets and STOMP, while using React Query to make server state and caching predictable for integrators.
• Designed responsive chat experiences that could fit naturally into both desktop and mobile web products.
• Set up AWS-backed CI/CD so the SDK, documentation, and releases could evolve together with less manual coordination.
• Worked across interface behavior, package architecture, integration ergonomics, and delivery rather than limiting ownership to the visible chat UI.

Outcome

• Gave customer teams a reusable route to production chat instead of a one-off implementation.
• Improved consistency across integrations through shared components, state conventions, examples, and published documentation.
• Made the SDK easier to maintain and release as part of the Applozic product offering that later joined Khoros.

The work reinforced a product-engineering lesson I have carried forward: for developer products, the API, documentation, debugging experience, and release reliability are all part of the user experience.