In today’s fiercely competitive age of product, efficient growth of engaged, happy users is the Holy Grail of product development. Growth can no longer be an afterthought or solely the responsibility of marketing. And as channels get saturated, ‘growth hacks’ no longer cut it. Your product has to be designed and built for growth from the foundation up.
Companies that have achieved efficient scale have found their own mantras and workflows for systematic growth: Netflix uses consumer science to test ideas with real customers, at scale. Amazon maximizes experiments. Spotify goes through product loops of think it, build it, ship it, tweak it.
These companies are using different words for the same thing—a system of rapid product iteration for achieving sustainable, systematic growth. In every industry, the companies that succeed are the ones that iterate faster than others. Intuit, now 35 years old, tests product ideas over 25 times a week to remain one of the most innovative companies in fintech.
Booking.com, part of the largest online travel group in the world, has hundreds of concurrent experiments running at any time.
So what’s holding everyone back from embracing this modern, impact-driven approach? Why isn’t everyone iterating faster?
There are a few core challenges. First, it’s easy to buy an A/B testing tool but hard to generate and prioritize high-impact opportunities to keep running great experiments. Second, if you are running A/B tests, often the ability to understand and learn from these experiments is limited to a few data scientists. Everyone else has to wait to hear about the results second-hand. Last, because growth needs to be everyone’s job and not siloed to one team, there needs to be a way to collaborate across large organizations on ideas and their eventual impact.
4 Building Blocks of Systematic Growth
Product teams need help getting past these bottlenecks and establishing the 4 fundamental building blocks of systematic growth. These four blocks are:
- Generating ideas cross-functionally for high-impact hypotheses.
- Experimenting and learning fast.
- Rolling out the winners from experiments to all customers.
- Broadcasting impact across the team so everyone know what’s working.
Most companies are either missing an important block or can’t tie these steps together into a streamlined process. They don’t have a way to iterate through this loop rapidly and, as a result, they struggle to drive growth. Today, we are changing that.
Today, we are excited to announce the Amplitude Growth Engine (beta), our industry’s first product iteration system that helps teams build for systematic growth. With the Growth Engine, you can now go from iterating once or twice a year to testing new hypotheses every week.
With the Growth Engine, you can now go from iterating once or twice a year to testing new hypotheses every week.
The Growth Engine helps product teams discover and stack rank high-impact hypotheses easily. After running experiments and learning from them, teams can focus on shipping the right improvements. The impact of these improvements are then automatically measured and broadcasted to the organization by Amplitude. Soon, the team will be able to generate new hypotheses, informed by a compounding knowledge of past results, and the cycle begins again.
CASE STUDY: Volaris increases upgrade conversion by 25%
The product team at Volaris, Mexico’s #1 ultra-low cost airline, was hunting for ways to increase cart size at checkout. After using Amplitude to dig into customer behaviors in the seat selection process, the team was able to formulate a hypothesis for optimizing seat upgrades. Volaris used Optimizely to test different versions of a new flow and, through analyzing the experiments in Amplitude, quickly identified and implemented a winning seat selection experience.
“When making improvements to our purchase flow, Amplitude helped us build a hypothesis and quickly interpret experiments. This gave us the confidence to make a change to seat upgrades that improved purchase conversion by 25%.” -Julio Farfan, Analytics and Optimization Leader, Volaris
Here’s a more detailed look at how the Amplitude Growth Engine removes friction and blockers to rapid iteration at each point.
1) Generate hypotheses
Coming up with ideas isn’t the problem—many product teams have lengthy backlogs. The core problem is identifying which opportunities are worth spending your team’s limited time and resources. High-impact opportunities only surface when you can easily explore patterns in your customers’ behavior, but that’s not always straightforward.
Solution: Conversion Behaviors
Conversion Behaviors surfaces patterns of behavior across your customer journey that contribute the most to customers’ likelihood of converting on a selected path. In Amplitude, you only need to click into your funnel and you’ll see the top behaviors associated with customers who convert. We think of this as a short list of high-impact growth opportunities.
Solution: 360 Sync
Amplitude’s new 360 Sync expands product teams’ understanding of their customer journey. You can now include in your view parts of the customer journey that occur in marketing automation tools like Braze, Iterable, SendGrid, and more.
2) Experiment and learn
Experiments are complex. Most teams have to wait weeks for an analyst just to interpret the results of one. And when they do get the results, they are often too narrow and don’t offer insight into impact on the team’s ultimate north star metric.
Solution: Experiment View
Experiment View helps product teams directly interpret the results from any split testing in Amplitude. You can also go beyond the immediate conversion to understand the full breadth of user behavior. You can see the downstream impact on retention, engagement, and your north star metric.
3) Roll out winners
You can never act fast enough on your learnings. Our customers feel that pain when targeting their users for a new feature or a marketing campaign because, often, the manual process of importing the right user cohorts into marketing automation tools blocks rapid iteration.
Solution: Cohort Sync
Cohort Sync enables hourly syncing of your customer cohorts with marketing automation and personalization tools. Amplitude has the most advanced behavioral cohorting in the industry and now other platforms can leverage these beautifully targeted cohorts. Cohort Sync is available today for Braze customers with more coming soon.
4) Broadcast impact
Even the best of product teams struggle to understand what’s driving impact in their products. When they do, this knowledge is limited to a small handful of individuals. Without a consistent way to feed learnings and impact back to your organization, it’s hard to generate the next cross-functional wave of high-impact ideas.
Solution: Releases
Releases automates impact analysis for every release. There are no buttons to press, no forms to fill out. Releases automatically detects product updates and emails a release report to everyone on your team end of the week. The report highlights all changes to your core metrics since your last release as well as new customer behaviors that Amplitude is now tracking. This impact report helps the entire organization build a collective intuition for what’s working.
Build for customer love. Build for impact. Build for growth.
For more information on Amplitude and the Growth Engine, you can sign up here. To learn more about how each of these new features works, subscribe to our blog!
