How to Drive Product Analytics Adoption with Amplitude

Amplitude hosted a webinar to discuss how teams can make product analytics part of their daily work and find the answers they need. We also broke down our platform’s newest innovations that make informed decision-making easier than ever. Ibrahim Bashir, Amplitude’s VP of Product, was joined by John Cutler, Toast’s Senior Director of Product Enablement.

What are the keys to becoming an expert in product analytics?

Knowledge and skills are essential to expertly using product analytics, but John and Ibrahim also point out that it takes regular use. Teams need to make product analytics a habit, make mistakes, and get feedback before they can refine their gut instincts around their data.

That said, product managers (PMs) are busy and may not be motivated to practice using a product analytics tool. They also need support from their leaders and a product analytics platform that’s user friendly.

Regular practice

According to Ibrahim, the reality of any enterprise software is that you need practice loops to bake the tool into your processes—whether that means importing data into the platform or curating datasets to keep them clean.

Ibrahim experienced this challenge firsthand while working at other companies and learning Amplitude. To practice using the tool, he started every day with a new question about Amplitude that he had to answer, such as “How can I use this tool to determine the drivers of a metric?” or “How can I use Amplitude’s forecasting features to set a metric’s annual target?” Ibrahim shared his learnings with team members at metrics review meetings and product discussions.

With practice, Ibrahim became comfortable with Amplitude. He made it part of his team’s processes, and it eventually became a central decision-making tool.

Motivational leaders

It’s easy to say that PMs should just use your product analytics tool. But as John notes, many PMs can’t fit every product initiative because their calendars are packed.

Ibrahim encourages leaders to ask, “What can we take off PMs’ plates to make adoption easier?” Give your product teams the capacity to make analytics mistakes and troubleshoot so they feel like they have the time and space to use your tool.

A flexible tool

PMs probably won’t be interested in a new product analytics platform if they’ve had negative experiences with other tools, John notes.

Look for a product analytics tool that’s easy to navigate so PMs can start using the platform and unlocking its value. At Amplitude, we’ve prioritized usability with an intuitive interface design—including drag-and-drop functionality and centralized actions in the top navigation.

How Amplitude’s latest updates empower everyone to unlock product insights

Many platforms offer a choice between decision speed and decision quality. But at Amplitude, we believe users should have both.

That’s why we built our latest round of product updates. The improvements empower any team member to make data-driven decisions—enabling them to easily create charts, analyze customer journeys, and access trustworthy datasets.

Surface industry-specific metrics with templates

Amplitude’s industry-focused dashboard templates help you access insights to make critical decisions. These templates make it easy to create a tailored dashboard in just a few clicks, so anyone on your team can get quick insights about your product right from your Amplitude homepage. We recently introduced an ecommerce template and plan to roll out this feature for various sectors—healthcare, fintech, gaming, SaaS, and more.

Shorten the learning curve with smart recommendations

As Ibrahim notes, there are always going to be team members who are intimidated by product analytics. But today, you can create a smooth ramp for everyone, regardless of their technical skills, with Amplitude’s new conversational AI feature.

This feature enables users to type a question such as “What is the fastest path to conversion over the last month?” and Amplitude creates a chart in response. In this case, Amplitude might show a bar graph of how many landing page visitors complete a purchase.

Uncover trends with simplified, intuitive reporting

Our latest chart design lowers the barrier to designing reports, so teams can feel confident using Amplitude and quickly form insights.

Your team can also fully view users’ paths with Amplitude’s customer journey analysis update. This feature lets you identify the most common conversion paths and the steps users take before converting. With this analysis, you can quickly spot friction points and fix them to help users reach their "aha" moment.

Make decisions with trust and confidence in your data

It’s hard to make confident decisions if you don’t have trustworthy data. As John points out, there’s nothing more demotivating than questioning your datasets when trying to form an insight.

On the flip side, John also observes that getting trustworthy data is easier than it seems. 

With Amplitude’s new Object Management Center, your team can keep data trustworthy by avoiding object duplication. Admins designate which objects—like metrics, custom events, segments, and cohorts—are “official,” so team members know which ones to use when analyzing data and creating reports. This feature is currently available for Amplitude enterprise plans.

Our investment in a Snowflake-native Amplitude also helps technical and non-technical teams access trustworthy data. Your organization can analyze product data in Snowflake without information ever leaving the Data Cloud, so there’s little to no risk of data drift. Your information stays secure and compliant because you can keep using your current security and privacy policies.

The best time to tackle product analytics is today

Ibrahim emphasizes that Amplitude’s job isn’t to help you create fancy reports. It’s helping you make decisions.

With that in mind, there’s no time to start your data-driven decision-making journey like the present. Amplitude’s platform and documentation enable every user to quickly get started.