How OBOS Uses Amplitude to Drive Outcome-Focused Product Decisions

Insights/Action/Outcome: As a large and complex organization, OBOS needed a way to understand how product changes, campaigns, and feature discovery influenced real user behavior and long-term conversion. By adopting Amplitude as a core analytics platform, OBOS shifted from shipping features based on assumptions to making product decisions grounded in outcomes. Teams across product, engineering, marketing, and sales now rely on shared behavioral insights to experiment faster, align more effectively, and focus on what truly drives value.

OBOS builds digital products for a broad and diverse customer base. As these products grew, teams needed deeper visibility into how users engaged with new features and campaigns inside the app.

Amplitude became a central part of the product development workflow. Teams use it to monitor usage, measure product performance, and evaluate how improvements affect both customers and the business.

This shift changed how OBOS defined success. Instead of asking whether something shipped, teams began asking whether it moved the right metrics.

One ongoing initiative focused on features hosted on external domains that were less familiar to OBOS users. While these features were valuable, teams did not know how often users discovered them or whether discovery influenced later conversion.

Using Amplitude, the team tracked exposure to these features and compared behavior between users who encountered them and those who did not. The insight was clear: Many users never saw the features, but those who did were significantly more likely to convert later.

This allowed the team to form a strong, data-backed hypothesis: That by improving visibility and accessibility of these features, it could meaningfully increase overall conversion. The conversation shifted from speculation to confident prioritization.

OBOS also uses Amplitude to measure the impact of large, high-traffic campaigns. Once a year, the company runs a month-long campaign in its discount app that drives usage far beyond normal levels.

During one such campaign, the product team ran an experiment to test whether highly engaged users would convert into a newly launched feature. Amplitude was critical in the experiment’s design and execution.

The results were immediate and visible. Daily active users increased by roughly 1000% during the campaign period, and retention rose to around 80%. These insights validated both the campaign strategy and the experiment design.

One of the most noticeable benefits of Amplitude at OBOS has been speed. Product managers can now segment users, set up experiments, and explore behavior without waiting on data teams.

Sharing live charts and funnels also improved alignment. Teams across product, engineering, marketing, and sales work from the same real-time view of performance, reducing debate and accelerating decision making.

Amplitude has also helped OBOS uncover insights that shape long-term strategy. In one analysis, the team discovered that users who interacted with the search bar before completing a key action had double the retention rate compared to those who did not.

Further exploration showed that search queries often pointed to content that was already popular. This insight suggested a clear opportunity to surface popular content more prominently and help users find value faster.

These discoveries now directly inform roadmap discussions and design decisions.

As OBOS continues to expand its use of Amplitude, teams emphasize starting with clear questions rather than default dashboards. Defining what they want to learn first helps avoid vanity metrics and keeps analysis focused.

They also highlight the importance of a shared event taxonomy and consistent tracking. Investing early in clean, reusable data models makes it easier for teams to ask new questions and trust the answers over time.

Amplitude has become more than an analytics tool at OBOS. It is the system that connects product work to business outcomes and customer value.

By shifting from feature delivery to outcome-driven development, OBOS has built a foundation for continuous learning. Teams move faster, experiments are sharper, and decisions are backed by evidence rather than intuition.