Amplify 19: Conference Recap

On Tuesday, October 8th, over 1,700 of the world’s most innovative product managers and analysts gathered in San Francisco for Amplify, Amplitude’s annual product conference. The conference presented attendees with a unique opportunity to share PM tips and tricks, hear from some of the most influential figures in the world of product, and get insights on Amplitude’s latest and greatest product features.

On the stage, Amplify’s speaker agenda featured thought leaders ranging from consumer-facing business leaders to venture capital investors to best-selling authors to leaders from their own innovative team. Merci Grace, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures and Founder of Women in Product, spoke about the ways in which her father continuously demonstrated the values of accountability, hard work, and volunteering to help, and how she has expressed these virtues throughout her own life and career. Merci suggests for brands to design and build intuitive processes requires an ownership mindset in product that is rooted in a service mentality. For more from Merci, visit her blog post, Happy to Help.

Attendees also heard from Marcelo Pascoa, Head of Global Marketing at Burger King, and Elie Javice, VP of Tech Product Management and CRM at Restaurant Brands International (Burger King’s parent company), who presented in tandem on how to maximize impact through product and marketing. Speaking first, Marcelo covered one of the core themes that drives the Burger King team, “Creativity + Data = Brand Love…. Without a great product, no amount of marketing will be able to make people buy what you are selling.” Further, great products are dependent on delivering creative experiences that are unique in the market and utilizing data to execute efficiently.

To provide an example, Elie dove into Burger King’s award-winning “Whopper Detour” campaign. For the campaign, Burger King used a combination of in-app messaging, location service, and CRM, all foundationally powered with a Customer Data Platform, to send push notifications in real time to customers located near a McDonald’s location offering one cent whoppers. Elie described that ambitious marketing campaigns, such as theirs, can only drive long-term value if you have the right product to support it. To design a product that work closely with marketing campaigns, Javice advised, “Build platforms that support creativity. Don’t build for the one-off campaign; build a platform that will lead marketing. The Whopper Detour was the first, but not last, campaign for their mobile app.”

To help all product managers achieve milestone campaigns such as “Whopper Detour,” the Amplitude team announced the release of their Scholarship Program for startups. In the product-led era, in which customers can transfer to competitors in a few clicks, the only true competitive advantage is outstanding customer experience. Amplitude recognizes that the ability to deliver those experiences, and knowing how to get them in front of the right market, is what will determine which early-stage companies will survive, and which will not. Amplitude, the first in their market to offer such a service, hopes to give all strong teams an equal opportunity for success. The program, which includes a free year of Amplitude valued at $24k, will be available to startups that are:

• Less than 2 years old
• Have received less than $5MM in funding
• Have fewer than 20 employees
• Have less than 20MM user events/month or about 50,000 tracked users/month

Whether you’re a startup considering Amplitude’s Scholarship Program or a veteran Amplitude user, leveraging a Customer Data Platform as your data foundation can enable more granular analytics and make it easier to deliver optimized customer experience at speed. For an example, check out how logistics disruptor Postmates used mParticle + Amplitude to save 1000+ hours in engineering time and optimize their onboarding journey.