Tuning (Early Access)

Tuning starts with Product Area settings. Product Areas define the goals, scope, sources, contrasts, metrics, and instructions that steer what Amplitude looks for and how it judges quality. If generated Opportunities feel misaligned, the first place to tune is the Product Area.

Feedback compounds inside that Product Area. Direct comments, thumbs up/down reviews, status changes, dismissals, edits, and triage decisions all help Amplitude improve future recommendations for the same Product Area.

What you can tune

Tune these settings when a Product Area produces Opportunities that feel misaligned, repetitive, too small, or too broad.

Define a strong focus area

A strong focus area gives the system a clear search space. It should name the user journey or product surface and describe what outcome matters.

Good focus areas:

• AI Feedback: Covers the full source-to-insight loop, including source connection, ingestion quality, theme generation, insight review, feedback triage, and repeated team usage. Excludes unrelated core analytics funnels unless they directly affect the feedback workflow.
• Dashboards: Covers first dashboard creation, chart edits over time, dashboard retention, sharing, exports, and recurring reporting workflows. Excludes deep chart-query authoring unless it directly blocks dashboard creation or ongoing dashboard usage.
• Checkout: Covers cart-to-payment completion, payment errors, recovery flows, purchase confirmation, and guardrail metrics such as latency. Excludes marketing landing pages and post-purchase retention unless they directly affect checkout completion.
• Session Replay for support: Covers replay discovery, support-led debugging, replay sharing, issue reproduction, and follow-up analysis. Excludes general replay exploration unless it directly supports support workflows.

Weak focus areas:

• Growth.
• The dashboard.
• Improve UX.
• Everything related to AI.

If a focus area feels broad, split it. For example, instead of one Product Area for "Onboarding", create separate areas for "First data connection", "First chart creation", and "Invite teammates".

Add contrast areas

Contrasts are nearby areas that are intentionally out of scope. They help the system distinguish useful opportunities from distracting ones.

Use contrasts when the Product Area borders another team, workflow, or metric.

Examples:

• For Checkout, include payment submission, error recovery, and purchase confirmation. Exclude marketing landing pages and post-purchase retention.
• For Chart Builder, include chart creation, save flows, query latency, and first useful visualization. Exclude dashboard layout and sharing unless they directly block chart creation.
• For AI Feedback, include source connection, ingestion reliability, insight quality, and repeated team usage. Exclude unrelated core analytics funnels.

Tune the opportunity mix

Opportunities can represent different types of work. Use Product Area guidance and triage feedback to shape the mix you want.

Match the mix to product maturity

For early products, allow more feature and wildcard opportunities. Early teams benefit from broader exploration and bigger swings.

For mature, high-volume surfaces, bias toward quick wins, bug fixes, experiments, and careful rollout plans. Mature teams usually need smaller, safer, more measurable changes.

For mid-maturity products, keep a balanced mix: some workflow improvements, some bug fixes, and a few larger bets.

Select the right sources

Sources determine what the system can learn. A Product Area with only analytics may find metric movement but miss the user experience behind it. A Product Area with only feedback may find sentiment but miss scale.

Use this guidance:

• Analytics for volume, conversion, retention, and segment-level impact.
• Session Replay for how the problem appears in real user behavior.
• AI Feedback for complaints, feature requests, and qualitative themes.
• Autocapture for product interaction signal when custom instrumentation is incomplete.
• Experiments for what teams have already tried and what moved metrics.
• Specialized Agents for ongoing domain-specific summaries.
• Web vitals for technical performance and page experience signals.
• Agent traces for AI-powered product usage, quality, and performance.
• Competitor context for market-aware ideas and comparable workflows.
• Custom Agents (coming soon) for MCP-connected internal data sources, proprietary systems, and workflows.
• Code repositories for execution plans that point to real implementation locations.
• Anomalies (coming soon) for emerging metric changes that need investigation.
• Surveys for direct user intent and satisfaction signals.
• PR reviews (coming soon) when code review activity can reveal delivery friction or implementation risk.

For high-confidence opportunities, look for at least two independent sources. For example, pair a funnel drop-off with session replay evidence, or pair a feedback theme with a supporting usage trend.

Use metrics as alignment anchors

Target metrics tell Amplitude how to score and frame opportunities. Each Product Area should include:

• Primary metrics that define success.
• Secondary metrics that help diagnose why the primary metric moves.
• Guardrail metrics that shouldn't regress.

Avoid using only one metric. A single conversion metric may produce narrow recommendations that ignore quality, latency, support burden, or downstream retention.

Write durable custom instructions

Custom instructions should encode stable preferences, not temporary tasks.

Good instructions:

• Prioritize opportunities with evidence from at least two independent sources.
• Prefer low-effort, reversible changes before high-complexity interventions.
• Include an experiment or rollout plan for mature, high-volume flows.
• Avoid opportunities that require changes outside the Checkout team unless they directly block checkout completion.

Avoid instructions like:

• Investigate the drop from last Tuesday.
• Focus on the latest release.
• Find five bugs this week.

Temporary requests belong in Global Chat or as comments on a specific Opportunity.

Run focused discovery

Product Area settings are durable, but not every investigation needs a settings change. Use a focused Discover run when you want the Opportunity Manager to investigate a specific overarching problem, user flow, page, or category of signal for one run.

Focused discovery is useful when you want to:

• Look for Opportunities around a specific page or flow, such as onboarding setup, checkout, or dashboard export.
• Direct agents toward a broad problem area, such as activation friction or performance issues.
• Investigate a category of signal, such as feedback themes, replay friction, web vitals, or experiment learnings.
• Go deeper into an area without changing the Product Area's durable scope, metrics, or instructions.

Focused discovery is different from submitting a manual Opportunity idea. Use focused discovery when you want agents to explore a scope and generate a batch of possible Opportunities. Use a manual Opportunity idea when you already have a specific idea and want Amplitude to flesh it out with evidence, scoring, and a plan.

Feedback is the tuning loop

Feedback is the ongoing tuning mechanism within a Product Area. Amplitude uses both explicit feedback and workflow behavior to improve future Opportunity alignment for that Product Area.

Thumbs up and thumbs down

Use thumbs up when an Opportunity is useful, well-scoped, and worth seeing more of. Use thumbs down when the signal is wrong, the plan is weak, or the Opportunity doesn't match the Product Area.

Every labeled input gives Amplitude context about your team's preferences for that Product Area. That signal helps the next discovery cycle rank and write Opportunities that better match the Product Area's goals.

Direct feedback

Leave comments when an Opportunity is wrong, weak, duplicated, too broad, or missing important context. Good feedback explains the reason, not just the decision.

Examples:

• "This is out of scope for Checkout. It belongs to account billing settings."
• "The evidence is too replay-heavy. Need chart-backed volume before prioritizing."
• "This is a good quick win, but the proposed fix should avoid changing the payment provider."
• "Duplicate of the payment retry work already in progress."

Triage feedback

Your triage choices also teach the system:

• Planned signals that the Opportunity matched the Product Area and quality bar.
• In progress signals that the spec was actionable enough to start work.
• Dismissed signals that the Opportunity didn't match the scope, had weak evidence, duplicated existing work, or wasn't worth pursuing.
• For review, Shipped, and Measured close the loop from recommendation to outcome.

Use statuses honestly. Don't leave low-quality or irrelevant opportunities in New forever. Dismissing and commenting on them gives the system stronger signal than ignoring them.

Review cadence

For best results:

1. Review new opportunities after each discovery run.
2. Dismiss irrelevant or weak opportunities instead of leaving them untouched.
3. Add comments when the reason matters for future discovery.
4. Move actionable opportunities through the lifecycle as work progresses.
5. Revisit Product Area settings when multiple opportunities show the same kind of mismatch.

Tuning isn't a one-time setup step. Treat Product Area settings like product strategy: the clearer the goals and boundaries, and the more honest the feedback, the more useful the recommendations become.