4X Increase in Drata’s Feature Adoption by Uncovering Product Gaps with Amplitude

Insight/Action/Outcome: Drata’s product and engineering teams use Amplitude to access critical user insights throughout their compliance automation platform, all while safeguarding sensitive information. They identified slowdowns in user onboarding by pinpointing where users disengaged on their customer journey. After experimenting with a key feature, the company rolled out an update and saw tremendous results: Four times more users adopted the feature, leading to 13,000 implementations—a massive surprise for Drata's team!

Data is my calling. I've spent over two decades exploring its power—from a top online video production company and a popular digital music store to my current role. I've always believed in data's unique ability to drive business growth and build trust by making smarter, more informed decisions.

At Drata, trust is our most valuable asset—time after time. We use artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor and collect evidence across our customers’ security compliance controls so they stay compliant with security requirements—whether they're a small startup or a global enterprise. Our software solution plugs into and monitors their systems 24/7 without human intervention, keeping them audit-ready at all times.

What does trust have to do with it? As software-as-a-service (SaaS) veterans, we know the pain of manually building a security and compliance framework—it's cumbersome, redundant, and error-prone. As companies grow, it becomes even more complex and costly. Automation simplifies this, but doing it well also requires access to sensitive data—creating a dilemma. On the one hand, we want to enable teams to dive deep into data to use insights and improve, but on the other, we need to ensure it stays protected from unauthorized users. Thus, our business relies on our customers’ trust to uphold the highest standards of security and integrity.

Blown away by 4x user engagement

When I joined Drata, I was thrilled to see Amplitude already in action. I could use insights from Amplitude right away to make our platform as seamless and secure as possible for our customers. A great example is onboarding. When a company starts with compliance automation, onboarding employees is one of the first steps. This involves tasks like signing policies, running background checks, or installing encryption apps.

Using Amplitude Analytics, we discovered that some companies were slow to complete onboarding for certain employees. We analyzed charts and funnels and mapped out customer paths to identify gaps, slowdowns, and friction points along their journey.

Our quantitative investigation, together with customer feedback and requests, revealed struggles with personnel-specific compliance tasks, impacting audit readiness. For example, a consultant joining a company doesn’t need to install and use every app, so that requirement shouldn’t hold them up. Over 100 customers requested a way to exclude certain tasks for specific roles to avoid such issues and speed up the process. It was a hot topic!

So, we set out to change this. We set internal benchmarks for each step of the onboarding process and ran experiments in Amplitude, introducing exclusion options for certain roles or functions.

We developed three exclusion options: for entire categories, specific groups, or individual users. This enabled customers to tailor compliance management to their needs. We rolled them out, forecasting adoption from around 500 customers because, for every one customer who requests a change, five typically adopt the new feature. But we were blown away when 2,000 customers jumped on board—four times what we expected! Even better, around 13,000 exclusions were implemented, way beyond what we imagined!

Secure self-serve data for all

Amplitude not only empowers us to build new, relevant features; it also helps us move quickly. In my past roles, data teams often slowed things down. Product managers and engineers constantly needed help to dig out valuable insights, making us feel like their gatekeepers. Traditional analytics tools were complicated, siloed, and lacked flexibility, so users couldn’t explore data on their own. Amplitude completely changed that. With Amplitude, we are able to save weeks of time on running analyses and focus on execution.

A huge shoutout here to Maria LaBrutto, my Amplitude mentor from the past! She went above and beyond what you would expect from a customer success resource and taught me so much. With her help, I saw Amplitude’s potential and brought those insights and data democratization to Drata.

With Amplitude, product managers and data engineers can access complex user engagement analyses directly, bypassing the data team. They can study data independently, innovate, and serve customers better. Even those without structured query language (SQL) skills can easily pull reports and track project progress. Amplitude's self-serve capabilities empower teams to tackle complex issues, achieve better results, and enhance our product’s relevance while securing sensitive information.

We balance self-service and data security by separating user behavioral data from sensitive customer information and ensuring each customer’s data is completely segregated—and safe.

This enables our team to be more creative and effective while maintaining full customer trust. We also prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data while continuing to optimize our customer experience.

Weaving data into a seamless story

I’m a huge fan of Amplitude as a whole, but right now, I particularly love Notebooks. Notebooks are perfect for sharing insights and context from our analyses to craft a complete story from our data—instead of just piecing together bits from different dashboards. We can go deeper into our data’s narrative and use that story to guide our next steps confidently.

As a fast-growing startup with finite resources, we must prioritize features that genuinely matter and help our customers succeed. Amplitude is critical to this, guiding us from small observations to assured decisions. This ongoing cycle of testing, learning, and refining helps us create a solid roadmap to tackle challenges.

We are highly meticulous when it comes to tracking the adoption and activation of new features. From the moment a feature is launched, we ensure that proper instrumentation is built into the product so we can immediately measure its impact on business metrics. We leverage Amplitude to monitor the health of the user experience through funnel analysis, which helps us drive customers toward activation and eventual adoption. Amplitude provides detailed insights into the user experience, allowing us to identify potential bottlenecks and prioritize areas for further investigation to optimize feature success.

Backing every decision with objective data brings game-changing benefits. It excites and motivates the team, showing them how their hard work truly makes an impact. It also highlights critical features for our customers, so we stay focused on improving them rather than just moving on. And the best part? By helping us prioritize the right features and eliminating distractions, Amplitude ensures we make the most of our time and energy so we can achieve our best work and drive remarkable progress for our customers.