How Datadog Used SpatialChat to Drive Upto 80% Active Participation in Engineering Sessions

Context: Extending the Evaluation Beyond Workshops

After initially testing SpatialChat for a technical workshop, the Datadog team continued exploring the platform as a potential environment for ongoing engineering sessions.

The team examined plans designed for 30–60 participants, which would allow multiple engineers to gather in a shared space for recurring meetings and discussion-driven sessions. Two configurations were considered: the Core Plan and an enterprise deployment that included additional capabilities such as single sign-on and unlimited rooms.

The objective was to determine whether a persistent virtual environment could improve how distributed teams hold technical discussions.

The Challenge: Making Distributed Engineering Discussions Less Rigid

Engineering teams frequently collaborate across different locations and time zones. While video meeting tools enable remote communication, they often impose a rigid structure on conversations.

Most sessions unfold in a single thread where participants speak one at a time, making it difficult for side discussions to emerge naturally. Breakout rooms offer an alternative, but switching between them interrupts the flow of conversation and requires manual coordination.

For teams exploring ideas or reviewing architecture decisions, these constraints can slow down discussion and limit spontaneous exchanges between engineers. The evaluation, therefore, focused on a practical question: Could a shared virtual environment support parallel technical discussions without requiring constant meeting management?

Evaluation Setup: A Shared Environment for Team Sessions

To explore this possibility, Datadog assessed how SpatialChat could function as a recurring workspace for engineering conversations.

Within the platform, participants can gather in different areas of the same virtual environment, forming small clusters where conversations occur simultaneously. Engineers can move between these clusters as topics evolve, allowing discussions to branch organically.

The environment can also include multiple rooms within the same space, enabling teams to host several related sessions without generating new meeting links. For distributed teams that meet frequently, this structure provides a single place where conversations can continue over time.

The evaluation considered several typical engineering scenarios, including team sync meetings, architecture reviews, brainstorming sessions, and informal discussions.

Results: Parallel Technical Conversations in a Shared Space

During the sessions hosted by Datadog, engineers did not remain in a single conversation thread as they would in a typical video meeting. Instead, discussions split naturally across the space, with two to three technical conversation clusters forming at the same time.

Participation remained high for a group of this size, with roughly 70–80% of attendees actively contributing during discussions. Engineers moved between groups as topics evolved, allowing architecture questions, debugging ideas, and design discussions to unfold in parallel.

Because conversations formed organically inside the shared environment, facilitators did not need to create or manage breakout rooms. Participants simply gathered around the topics they wanted to explore, which kept discussions fluid and reduced the coordination overhead usually required in structured video meetings.

For Datadog’s distributed engineering groups, this format allowed multiple technical threads to develop simultaneously while keeping everyone connected within the same virtual workspace.

What the Evaluation Demonstrated

The evaluation showed that spatial environments can support distributed engineering discussions more flexibly than traditional meeting tools. Instead of a single-threaded call, teams can hold several related conversations simultaneously while remaining within the same shared space.

For Datadog, the experiment provided insight into how a persistent virtual environment might support recurring team sessions across distributed engineering groups. For SpatialChat, the case highlights the platform’s relevance for developer teams seeking alternatives to conventional video meetings for small-group technical discussions.