Digital transformation has gone beyond a trend into a business mandate. At the close of 2020, 91% of organizations were undertaking some form of digital transformation. And investment in direct digital transformation initiatives is predicted to reach $6.8 trillion by 2023.

Unfortunately, despite the money being thrown at transformation, most companies lack a long-term vision of what being a digital business means.

“Once you’ve spent all this time and money and effort and probably millions of dollars … actually transforming, you have to optimize it. You have to figure out what digital products and digital investments you’re making,” said Jennifer Johnson (pictured), chief marketing and strategy officer at Amplitude Inc. “You build a product, you put it out to market and revenue comes out the other end. But how do you know if you’re building the right things in the first place?”

In anticipation of the AWS Startup Showcase: Innovations With Cloud Data — set to kick off on March 24 — John Walls, host of SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, theCUBE, spoke with Johnson for an exclusive interview on the rise of digital business and the new standards for customer engagement. (* Disclosure below.)

Moving beyond counting clicks into product intelligence

Becoming a digital business is “about redesigning your business and transforming value through new digital products and services,” Johnson stated. Traditional digital marketing tools were built to measure surface metrics such as views, impressions or clicks. In a digital business, understanding customer behavior means knowing how customer interactions within the digital product itself can affect business outcomes.

“Eighty-five percent of companies are using marketing analytics tools to answer questions like ‘What features do we need to build?’” Johnson said. “Knowing what ads people clicked on and what web visits that people had, that’s not going to answer it. That’s just answering a totally different question.”

What digital businesses need to know is how to pinpoint patterns of behavior and adapt the experience to create the desired outcome. This is achieved thanks to product intelligence.

“Product intelligence … connects digital products to revenue,” Johnson explained. “If you know something works and you know that every customer that looks like that person will do this and you can predict an outcome, why wouldn’t you serve that up to every single person that looks like that?”

Amplitude is a leader in product intelligence, enabling businesses to monitor user behavior and know exactly where, when and how to encourage action. “Prediction and understanding and prediction and adapting, that’s really where Amplitude plays a role,” Johnson said.

Amplitude democratizes access to product data

As companies move toward digital operations, 49% are struggling to understand user behavior, with 63% of C-suite executives stumped with how to become more product-led. Ahead of the curve are digitally native companies, which were created understanding that their business centered on digital products and that constantly testing, tweaking and optimizing customer interaction and experience was vital. These were early adopters of Amplitude, according to Johnson. Now, with the digital mandate spreading, she is seeing “a really long tail” of more traditional industries interested in Amplitude’s product intelligence solution.

“What we’re helping to do is help organizations just answer the question: ‘How is our product tied to our revenue?’” Johnson explained.

Product intelligence can help decrease the cultural disruption brought about by digital transformation and make the overall process smoother and faster, according to Johnson. She describes the delays caused by the traditional process for gaining product intelligence within a large business-to-consumer company.

“If you have a question about something or a hypothesis that you want to answer, a lot of times you have to send this request to some centralized data team or a data science team,” she said, explaining how it then takes few weeks to months to receive a response, which triggers more questions, and so the process repeats.

“By the time you figure out the answer to your question, it’s enough time to get Amazoned in the new digital era,” Johnson stated.

Amplitude cuts out the middlemen of the business intelligence and data scientist teams to deliver answers directly and instantly to product management, sales, marketing, customer success and every other department across the business.

“What we’re doing is helping to bring that data, which we all know is the crown jewel of any organization … we’re democratizing it and bringing it to all the teams that need it,” Johnson said. “Imagine a world where any time you have a touchpoint with a customer, you can use this insight into what they’re doing in the product to get some level of intelligence that you didn’t have before and use it to proactively give them a better experience.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations, and watch theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase Event: Innovators in Cloud Data. (* Disclosure: Amplitude Inc. sponsored this CUBE Conversation. Neither Amplitude nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE