Every business decision is a calculated risk. You weigh the costs and benefits, look at your options, and outline a plan. Sometimes, you have to make complex calculations that will impact every aspect of your business, but often you’re simply looking at the bottom line.
I’m one of two product directors at 360Learning, a SaaS Edtech company that expanded into the American market. We offer a Learning Management System (LMS) that empowers businesses to rapidly identify and close skill gaps through collaborative learning. With 360Learning, clients can crowdsource learning needs in real-time and launch engaging academies, cohort programs, and interactive courses in minutes instead of months.
We serve SMBs and enterprise clients. We encourage training teams and subject-matter experts in every area of a company to create training courses they can share with their peers. This approach enables companies to scale and transform their training strategies by leveraging the wisdom, skills, and know-how that already exist at every level of their organization.
In 2017, 360Learning changed our data analytics platform, but we didn’t realize the impact would reach much further. Our new solution helped democratize data, spur collaboration, and lead to a more self-sufficient workforce.
Democratizing Data and Improving Customer Communication
I started as a Product Manager at our Paris office and transferred to our New York City operations in 2021. When I joined the company, we were just purchasing Amplitude to improve how we track our products and monitor the adoption of our solutions. Because pricing isn’t calculated per user, anybody can access the platform and all available data at no extra cost. That was attractive to us.
In 2018, 360Learning structured its Product team into autonomous squads that own their part of the product and address the main KPIs. Using Amplitude allowed us to get data into everyone’s hands across the organization, aligned with our strong culture of transparency. Everyone in the company has access to Salesforce, our global project management tools, product roadmap, KPIs, and every team’s goals. Our squads have the autonomy to find the data they need, so they don’t think twice about asking questions of data or using data to make evidence-based decisions about product improvements.
Our squads have the autonomy to find the data they need, so they don’t think twice about asking questions of data or using data to make data-driven decisions.
Amplitude helps us improve communications with customers, too. For example, our Customer Success Partners leverage the platform to gather more data for customers and generate quarterly business reviews demonstrating the impact of our product and their learning initiatives. Using our collaborative learning dashboard, we can see how a particular customer uses a specific solution and monitor critical metrics like interactions per active user, total active users, and course completion rates. We can then point out potential roadblocks to customers and our engineers.
Multiple Use Cases Across Squads
As one of two Product Directors, I most often use Amplitude to track my team’s KPIs. If I encounter an issue, like a drop in users or engagement, I can ping the Product Manager in charge of that KPI, ask if the problem is on their radar, and discuss the explanation and action plan. Amplitude charts allow us to segment users into different cohorts based on their activity. We also use Funnel Analysis to optimize conversions, especially for customers who sign up for our free trials. Amplitude helps us see how users get from Point A to Point B, which isn’t always obvious.
Amplitude’s Pathfinder chart helps us understand how people arrive at a specific point. What did they do before reaching that page? What path did they follow, and what triggered their user journey? I encountered a situation a few years ago where I couldn’t figure out why we weren’t converting people who had signed up for our free trial from one page to another. I used Pathfinder to map their journey across our platform and discovered a glitch that diverted them to a page they should never have reached. We fixed the error, corrected the behavior, and improved conversions.
Our squads also use Amplitude Notebook to craft stories with data extracted from our dashboards. Amplitude makes it simple to author easy-to-understand reports using a single tool instead of exporting charts and data to PowerPoint and Excel. Users can add comments directly into a chart for more context, and they can also highlight figures to explain what’s driving a KPI or a trend.
One of our Product Managers created a Notebook explaining how and why a KPI dropped, and then shared the link with our teams. He brought everyone up to speed in minutes, and we saved ourselves a meeting to discuss the problem. Instead, we immediately set to work to improve that KPI.
Our finance team uses Amplitude to report to our board and investors. C-level executives have access to a high-level dashboard so they can quickly get the information they need. But if they want more detail, I can help them drill down as far as they need to go—freeing them to manage the business.
Amplitude fosters seamless collaboration because everyone has open access to a single data pool and tool to create actionable insights.
Amplitude fosters seamless collaboration because everyone has open access to a single data pool and tool to create actionable insights.
Reaping the Rewards of Our Training Program
360Learning has made Amplitude part of our corporate culture. All new hires from the Customer Success, Engineering, Product, Design, and Growth teams, among others, receive training for Amplitude and must create an account as part of their onboarding. Since we’re a training company, we’ve used our in-house platform to write and share content. I created a training course that gives users the basics, like establishing a new user account and an overview of different charts and graphs.
I think the mandatory training is part of our success with Amplitude. The platform is intuitive enough that once people gain a basic understanding of the most-used features, they can explore on their own. It’s worth the investment to build a quick training, even if it’s a short video recording or demo. Asynchronous training makes it easy to scale, and squads can refer to the video if necessary rather than come to one person with simple questions.
We have become more structured as a team, too. Until recently, I was the go-to person for data questions. When I was promoted to Product Director, however, I no longer had the time or focus to address everyone’s questions. Instead, I can make the most of my time and Product Operations now owns Amplitude questions for anything that people can’t answer on their own. On top of that, we have a Data Engineer who supports us more and more on transversal data-related topics, and we are considering building a more robust Data team.
Amplitude has given us much more than a way to track KPIs and trace the impact of product changes. We now have the confidence to try new approaches because we base every decision on data and measurable results. Amplitude has given 360Learning ownership of our data and has allowed us to build an open, more collaborative culture.
