Transforming a Product Development Culture to Cut Down Data Analysis Time, Experiment Faster, and Increase Conversions

Insight/Action/Outcome: The LIFULL HOME’S team wanted to increase the quality and quantity of their experiments. Two months into the adoption of Amplitude, one team ran an experiment that saw the biggest jump in website leads in the past 5 years. Thanks to Amplitude’s ease of sharing insights, other teams began to take notice and were inspired to run their own experiments.

Developing products without data means even foolish ideas can be justified. You're fleshing out your products based on guesswork and intuition, which means you're possibly undercutting any data-driven insights.

To make the best decisions, data is critical. When you actually have data and can understand user behavior, you can make truly great products for end users. And at LIFULL HOME'S, we’ve used data to fundamentally change our approach to user behavior analysis.

LIFULL HOME'S is one of the largest property portals in Japan, similar to Zillow or Trulia in the US market. Our role is to connect users with a realtor in their area so they can find apartments, single-family homes, investment properties, or plots for new construction.

I'm the Chief Product Officer at LIFULL HOME’S, focusing on enhancing multiple products in the real estate domain. Before this, I worked with domestic projects at LIFULL, and then expanded into leading several international business developments outside of Japan at one of LIFULL’s overseas subsidiaries.

LIFULL HOME'S name comes from the idea of making “everyone's life full.” To follow through on our mission, we want to do more to help people find a home they'll love—which requires a very strong grasp of user behavior and product analytics.

Lacking a holistic customer view

I'm pleased to say that our product team's culture has always been data-driven. Unfortunately, we haven't always had access to the best tools for the job. We used Google Analytics for years, but because of our many customizations, it was incredibly hard to use. The learning curve was steep and difficult to understand, and even if you had experience with Google Analytics in the past, you would still find it challenging to understand our setup.

Since we couldn't look at customer data behind a single pane of glass, we spent hours, days, or sometimes even weeks trying to get a full picture of our customers. We could attempt to perform this data analysis one or two times per year, but it was downright unrealistic to accomplish the process more often than that.

The disparate nature of our data setup prevented us from having a holistic view of user behavior. And because proper data analysis took a long time in Google Analytics, we couldn't pivot quickly or look for intricate customer trends. Our manual and tedious process of data extraction and analysis inhibited our ability to quickly detect and address user pain points, which slowed our ability to move quickly as a company or make our platform more accessible to users.

Myself and the rest of the product team felt that there was something wrong. We just didn't know how to approach the issue or find a more suitable platform for our needs.

That is, until we stumbled upon the answer to our problems in a recommended YouTube video.

Stumbling upon the right solution

We came across Amplitude truly by coincidence.

We were in the process of implementing a customer data platform when one of our project leaders saw Amplitude recommended on YouTube. He took a look at its features in the recommended video and immediately recognized it as a platform we needed to implement. It was there that we started our journey into product analytics.

Product analytics platforms aren't well-known in the Japanese market. Many companies don't know that these platforms exist, so for us, stumbling across Amplitude was truly a game-changer. It also helped us understand where the challenges were with using Google Analytics.

Google Analytics specializes in web analytics because their business model is search-based advertising. They have no incentive to focus on behavior inside the product—which is Amplitude’s core focus. As a platform fully dedicated to product analytics that could easily run A/B tests (something we couldn’t do well in the past), it became clear Amplitude was an efficient solution to the business challenges we faced.

We initially implemented Amplitude into one of our smaller product teams—and quickly recognized we needed to change our thinking completely from our approach with Google Analytics. We finally had a very capable product and needed to understand how to use it better. So we decided to focus on upskilling our knowledge with the help of a data analytics competition.

Coincidentally, Amplitude was hosting an analytics competition in Japan. This would allow us to learn even more about the platform. So I called up my product managers to join in the challenge, and as a team, we won first place in the competition. That speaks volumes to how intuitive Amplitude is.

Our surprising win got many people on board with adopting Amplitude, but some were still skeptical about implementing it fully. I decided to keep things simple by giving advanced guidance to just one team.

Approximately two months into our experimentation with Amplitude, the product team struck gold. They ran an experiment that saw website leads have the biggest lift in five years. This had an immediate impact and sent a shockwave through our company. Suddenly, everyone started to take notice.

With Google Analytics, we wouldn’t have even been able to run that experiment—let alone get the results. It was there that the snowball effect began.

Cutting down analysis time, running better and faster experiments, and increasing conversions

With the help of Amplitude, LIFULL HOME'S reinforced its data-driven culture with data democratization. As product managers shared the results of each experiment, more and more stakeholders wanted to dig into the specifics. Luckily, sharing insights and results from experiments is easy within Amplitude. One by one, designers and engineers started using Amplitude to view the results of their projects. Now, 200 of our team members use Amplitude.

Amplitude's enhancement in our data infrastructure and customer data platform (CDP) ultimately liberated us from outdated processes, providing a more effective methodology to understand user behavior and unearth valuable insights. The challenges were daunting, but the potential of Amplitude to transform our organization was a beacon in the haze.

And the results we obtained far exceeded our expectations:

• We reduced our data analysis time by 90%, which significantly reduced our workload. The reduction in man-hours has directly allowed for a quicker utilization of data, leading to more experiments.
• Using Amplitude, we now have 1.5x faster experiment speeds for quicker and more relevant experimentation. Our product team can look for intricate patterns more frequently, helping us determine whether the chicken or the egg came first.
• Our A/B success rate increased by 2.8x, which ensures more accurate testing. Everyone on staff feels comfortable and confident running experiments — something we never could have with Google Analytics.
• We now have a 10X increase in our number of user leads via experiments. This is one of the areas I'm particularly proud of.

Our qualitative results are just as powerful. To start, we unfolded a new aspect of our data-driven culture focused on holistic user behavior analysis, spotlighting insights, and identifying user challenges. Amplitude's democratized data not only invigorated our internal processes, but also significantly improved the user experience across our products.

All these results stem from Amplitude's ability to gather detailed behavior behind a single pane of glass. It's almost incomparable to Google Analytics, since we can now obtain insights into almost every facet of user behavior.

It's also simple and easy for us to identify correlations between one type of user behavior and another. All my product managers say, "We can never go back to Google Analytics."

And after working with Amplitude for the past few years, I strongly agree with them.

Recognition, inside and out

Before Amplitude, LIFULL HOME’S product development processes didn’t change for many years. We had been doing the same thing for more than two decades, so pioneering a big shift would upset more people. But with Amplitude, altering our approach felt seamless and natural.

Of course, there were plenty of opportunities for my team to not embrace this change. There were also many, many moments to say no to this new way of thinking. But as a team, we were able to make the transformation. We are a completely different product team than we were just three years ago.

Not only has LIFULL HOME'S achieved significant advancements internally, but with Amplitude, we have also made a splash in the wider world. We came away with a win at the 2023 Growth Marketing Awards, and have been recognized as a best-practice organization by the "Japan Product Management Insights 2023 Report." Researchers from our company were even invited to speak at the RESEARCH Conference 2022, which is an achievement I hold in the highest regard.

I'm very proud of my product team's willingness to challenge and enjoy the journey of product analytics. I also love how we're still using data to make the best possible platform we can.

Our map for the future includes wider product use analytics, faster implementation of measurements, and aligning ourselves to a consistent growth cycle. With the power of Amplitude, we strive to harness meticulous analytics and advanced user understanding. We are still on a path toward increasing our product team's performance with a greater number of experiments. With Amplitude, the best is yet to come!

From enhancing the depth of our data analysis process to driving the success of our operations, Amplitude's support was invaluable in reshaping our culture and achieving our strategic goals. It was our cornerstone for success, turning our data-driven aspirations into robust practices and concrete results.