Smartsheet answers critical questions in weeks, not months, with Amplitude

Insight/Action/Outcome: Relying on BI for analytics left product teams at Smartsheet waiting months to make critical decisions. Investing in self-serve data and real-time insights with Amplitude cut decision-making time to weeks. This move set the foundation Smartsheet needed to move faster and capitalize on growth opportunities, such as AI, which directly impact revenue.

The key to retaining happy, loyal customers begins with understanding how they feel about our product. That knowledge includes what features they use most, which ones they use least, and how successfully they complete tasks.

​Getting answers to those questions was once a massive undertaking at Smartsheet. Trying to uncover a simple question, such as “How many people interacted with these features last month, and what’s the correlation with retention?” could take weeks to get an answer for. This was a huge problem for our team.

Smartsheet is an intelligent work management platform that unites people, data and AI to turn strategy into measurable enterprise impact. We saw massive opportunities to incorporate AI into our platform, but to take advantage of the technology, we needed better, accessible insights into user behavior.

Removing bottlenecks by increasing access to analytics

Our primary issue was that the product management team was entirely reliant on the BI team for product insights. It’s not easy to find answers among SQL tables, especially if you’re not a data scientist with intimate knowledge of the company’s data structures. Few PMs at Smartsheet had that knowledge. Instead, we dealt with long backlogs, shifting priorities that put requests on the back burner, and a lot of swirl. It slowed decision-making considerably.

Amplitude got us out of that hole.

When I joined Smartsheet, our stack included several BI tools, but only Amplitude Analytics offered the depth and breadth of insights we needed to better understand our core users — and to put that knowledge directly in the hands of the people planning and building product experiences. It quickly became my focus to mature our Amplitude implementation with a structured taxonomy, growth plan, and adoption strategy.

​Today, Smartsheet PMs, engineers, designers, and researchers use Amplitude daily to track engagement, retention, and how users accomplish tasks with our product. A simple funnel analysis of a new feature, which previously took weeks of waiting on a backlog for manual SQL analysis, is now instant.

My focus is on improving access to insights across the organization, and implementing Amplitude made a big difference in our ability to get data into the hands of those who needed it most and remove the company’s dependency on the BI team for every insight.

Saving time and making improvements that boost revenue

​Replacing our drawn-out weekly reporting process with real-time dashboards saves everyone time and effort. It also allows anyone to answer questions using the most up-to-date information. Now, when asked about new feature performance at a larger organization meeting, all a PM has to do is pull up their dashboard, that they built themselves, to share the results instantly. We can collectively decide on a course of action without delay, confident in the accuracy of our data.

Increasing teams’ self-serve capabilities means that data-informed product decisions, which used to take months, now take weeks or days. We’ve also discovered some cool hacks, like finding a proxy for a complex legacy funnel with just a few clicks. Figuring that out was a fun project that saved an engineer days of coding. Combined with our increasing use of Amplitude Feature Experimentation and Guides and Surveys for in-app messaging, we’re beginning to try more things, iterate faster, and personalize experiences.

Having direct access to clickstreams, cohort funnels, and other behaviors helps PMs discover questions we never thought to ask before. Following those threads and dissecting data to satisfy our curiosity has unlocked valuable—sometimes unexpected—insights we couldn’t access through previous formal data requests.

One area where this has a big impact is new customer onboarding, a crucial part of the user experience. Using Amplitude to analyze that funnel, we discovered exactly where and why users dropped off. That information led us to design and test specific improvements, and we can confidently release changes to improve our onboarding exit rates. These actions have had a direct, positive impact on customer retention, which is the primary driver of our overall revenue.

As easy as Amplitude is for beginners and experts, it’s only as good as the data we feed it. Much of this telemetry flows through Amazon S3, which we use as a scalable storage layer to collect and organize product interaction data before it’s analyzed in Amplitude.

We continuously seek ways to enhance our telemetry, increase tracking across our most valuable services, and ensure that our data is in the correct structure and format. We’ve made massive progress with the support of the Amplitude team, and our data quality has improved as a result of our efforts.

Data that prepares us for the AI revolution

As significant as these changes are to product teams and the company’s bottom line, Smartsheet’s broader goal was cultural: to shift our entire culture by democratizing data.

With self-serve analytics from Amplitude, we are in the process of achieving that goal. We went from performing manual queries and navigating cumbersome bottlenecks to being able to self-serve and instantly understand how users engage with our product and how we can expand our user base.

When I look at Amplitude’s acquisitions and feature releases over the past few years, I notice a trend toward platform growth and maturation. Amplitude's continued investment in tooling for AI and next-generation product experiences gives me confidence the platform will grow alongside our needs.

The platform is now so integral to our velocity and data culture that the thought of reverting to our old ways is unthinkable. As Smartsheet invests in AI to transform how people and organizations amplify work, the stakes for understanding user behavior only get higher. We need to know quickly whether new AI-driven intelligent experiences are resonating, where users struggle, and what drives lasting adoption — and Amplitude gives us the means to answer those questions at the speed our ambitions demand.