Meet the company that’s bringing product analytics to the next level

It isn’t necessary to talk about how important digitalization is anymore. More than 60% of the world is already online, and most businesses are either already tech companies or poised to become one, a trend that the pandemic has accelerated.

As we shift our main medium of interaction to the digital realm, we’re creating large amounts of data. The companies that are able to tap into these behavioral data assets have the opportunity to refine their solutions to fit the exact needs of customers, positioning themselves as industry leaders in the process.

“The nature of our reality is increasingly defined by how we are able to interact with digital products,” says Julio Bermudez, the vice president for Asia Pacific and Latin America at product analytics solutions company Amplitude, a leading product analytics company. “If we make [these products] better for everybody over time, it shapes the entire world.”

With that, it’s become crucial for companies to put out good products, not just adequate ones. But the question now becomes, ”What makes a good product?”

According to Bermudez, it’s about understanding that what makes or breaks a product is its user experience.

“We see time and time again that the best product wins, almost regardless of all other factors. What makes a product is really listening to your customers and users and understanding them,” the executive says.

With a quarter of downloaded apps being deleted after just a single use, the margin for error is razor thin.

Julio Bermudez, vice president for Asia Pacific and Latin America at Amplitude / Photo credit: Amplitude

Introducing a new way forward

The teams that can visualize their customers’ digital journey – from the first click on an ad to repeat purchases – are the ones who will be successful. They know their customer, recognize what to build next, and are conscious of what drives results.

However, understanding user behavior is a challenge that data scientists, product developers, and marketing teams have puzzled over for decades. Even figuring out what the baseline for a good user experience is can be a challenge.

When the idea of user experience first took off, organizations gathered information via recordings of customers interacting with their products or through painstaking user feedback and research sessions.

These efforts yielded in-depth information but were often time-consuming and weren’t scalable. There was also the problem that these sessions were inevitably more qualitative than quantitative – one individual could have an outsized influence on the overall outcome – making them ineffective in creating the personalized experiences that are the key to success.

In order to chart a better way forward, Amplitude launched a product analytics platform that places user behavior and data-based decisions at the forefront of how organizations build products and experiences.

Companies often use a combination of analytics and business intelligence tools to derive insights about their business, Bermudez explains. Amplitude’s platform allows a firm to monitor a product’s real-time performance in order to glean a better understanding of user behavior. In doing so, it drives more efficient development decisions and enhances the user experience across all stages of the customer journey.

The platform also scales and speeds up the user feedback process in order to give product, marketing, engineering, and data science crews a broader understanding of their user base at an aggregate scale.

Photo credit: Amplitude

“When the customer completes the form or downloads the app, that’s not the end of the customer journey – in fact, that’s the beginning,” says Bermudez. “Now you get the chance to understand how they are using your product and how to retain them or monetize them further.”

Helping big brands adapt

Its knowledge of its customer base is a big reason for NBC Universal’s growth as a giant in the media and entertainment industry. As the company’s investment in data and user insights has grown, though, so too has its demand for sophisticated analytic processes.

“They had focused a lot of energy on gathering more data points, but transforming them to actionable insights at the speed that matches the expectations of users today was becoming increasingly difficult,” Bermudez explains.

Core to the problem was the inability of the product and marketing teams to collaborate and align. This led to a heavy reliance on the data science team to provide support, which then meant that it was unable to ship solutions as quickly as it needed to.

To find a solution to the issue, the entertainment titan turned to outside sources for help. “After working with us, NBC was able to improve metrics and, more importantly, build an overall culture of experimentation and data-driven storytelling across teams,” Bermudez says. Successful experiments in homepage segmentation and user experience bore positive results, doubling NBC’s retention rates.

“We also saw this in our work with Traveloka,” the vice president says, referring to the online travel company. “It quickly recognized the potential of our system and created access for different teams to leverage the platform and learn critical insights.”

The collaboration with Traveloka started with its Platform and Data teams’ desire to improve retention by identifying features that correlate with growth and those related to churn. Now, the Amplitude platform has become one of the sources for insights on the full customer journey – it even has different teams such as customer service, marketing, and hotels using the platform’s product analytics capabilities to inform critical business decisions.

“Through the pandemic, Traveloka has established itself as a trailblazer in technological innovation,” Bermudez says. “With initiatives and launches of products that quickly respond to shifting demands, we’re excited for them to emerge stronger post-pandemic.”

With Amplitude’s platform, product developers are able to layer questions and draw conclusions between seemingly disparate pieces of data. This not only helps them better understand user behavior, but it also allows them to build features that consumers actually want, creating real customer lifetime value.

The next stage of the digital product

For Bermudez, improving the product experience is the greatest opportunity for growth. “We’re not helping you with incremental improvement to a marketing activity; we’re helping your core [intellectual property] or product, which is increasingly synonymous with who you are.”

Indeed, a brand’s product is its central identifier. A bad product can result in a negative reputation, which is why marketing and product development, once two separate functions, are becoming more intertwined.

“We increasingly believe that product will be your best salesperson, your best marketer, your best customer service representative, your best everything,” he says. “What we really want to enable is for the teams responsible for creating digital products and experiences to move away from building things just to meet business requirements.”

Now, Amplitude is actively advocating this message to markets within Asia Pacific, starting with its base in Singapore. The region presents the greatest opportunity for the company to help make products that can improve lives, Bermudez says.

“If you look at the internet penetration rates and the growth of people that are coming online – digital product users – there’s no area in the world that is growing faster [than Asia Pacific],” he says. “We are here to help humanity through helping people build better products, and Asia is just the biggest opportunity.”

In 2020, Amplitude launched its 2020 Product Intelligence Report, which found that firms working with platforms like Amplitude were 5.5 times more likely to see their revenue grow by over 25%.

To learn more about how companies are accelerating innovation and growing digital revenue with insights,, download the report at this link.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.