Leaving Guesswork Behind: How Temporal Increased Sign-ups by Doubling Down on PLG

Insight/Action/Outcome: Temporal doubled down on product-led growth, but limited data visibility put its strategy at risk. By consolidating with Amplitude, the team unified web and product data, building a single source of truth. Temporal unlocked higher signup conversions, faster activation, and sustained growth across teams and accounts.

A couple of years ago, we at Temporal rolled out self-signup for Temporal Cloud as part of our move to product-led growth (PLG). Our goal was simple: let developers discover, sign up, and use our platform on their own. No gatekeepers, no manual onboarding.

The problem is, PLG only works when it’s grounded in data. And at the time, we just weren’t.

We couldn’t track how users moved from our website into the product, or what they did afterward. We relied on hunches instead of facts, putting the entire user experience and our new strategy at risk.

Disconnected data, decisions by guesswork

Temporal is a global, open-source developer platform used by hundreds of thousands of developers to build durable, resilient applications and complex, AI-powered workflows. We make sure code always finishes, even when systems fail.

​We’re built on reliability, so not being able to view our own customer journey was a big problem.

​When I became Director of Growth, I planned to use data and experimentation to improve customer experience. The idea was attainable, but our setup made it difficult. Website analytics lived in one place, and product data lived in another. The lack of cohesion meant we couldn’t connect actions on the website to outcomes in the product.

If we were going to lean harder into PLG, that approach wouldn’t cut it.

Growing self-signups for Temporal Cloud required a more durable data foundation — one that could detail the end-to-end journey, decode user actions across our website and product, surface optimization opportunities, and measure how experiments influenced user behavior.

Finding an analytics partner we could trust

Selecting Amplitude was about more than features (though those mattered). We quickly came to trust the platform based on several factors:

• A strong reputation as a leader in analytics and user behavior.
• Robust onboarding support that got us started with a clean event strategy, taxonomy, and a setup that fostered scalability.
• An ever-evolving product roadmap — complete with new capabilities like pulling in ad spend for ROI calculations and advanced AI agents — that uncovered more growth potential.

From day one, Amplitude transformed our fragmented web and product data into a single source of truth. We had a holistic view of how users discovered, used, and grew with Temporal. Teams across the company were finally working from the same data, making informed decisions and validating experiments.

Busting assumptions with real evidence

Analytics gave us immediate clarity. We started by measuring the self-sign-up funnel, from web traffic and sign-ups through activation, adoption, retention, and expansion. We even tracked expansion into other teams within accounts, giving us a complete view of customer growth and upsell potential.

Some insights were eye-opening. One of the longest-held beliefs at Temporal was that only existing Temporal experts would sign up for Temporal Cloud. Amplitude revealed the opposite: most initial signups were from people who had never used Temporal before.

That single insight forced us to completely redesign our emails, lifecycle messaging, and sales outreach. We shifted to a less technical, more human approach that met users where they were, not where we assumed they were.

​Using Heatmaps within Session Replay added even more detail. We saw what steps users took, where they hesitated, and how they interacted with documentation and learning resources. That data guided content improvements and page changes, which improved adoption and customer success.

Amplitude Web Experimentation gave us even more control. We tested copy, button text, and landing pages in real time, and validated changes with measurable results. We had the proof to support every tweak, and the data helped us make decisions faster and more confidently.

Getting ahead in the new world of AI search

The ROI from Amplitude has been significant. By identifying and resolving pain points such as quickstart friction and payment verification issues, we improved account activation funnel efficiency by nearly 50%. Combined with overall customer growth, those efforts have resulted in a 5x increase in the number of weekly signups for Temporal Cloud. We’ve also improved activation within the first 14 days and achieved higher long-term adoption, retention, and cross-team expansion. We’re seeing more opportunities to grow with existing customers and new ones alike.

While we’re busy keeping up with in-product user behavior, we’re also leveraging Amplitude to help us navigate broader changes. AI is changing how developers discover, evaluate, and adopt tools. Amplitude AI Visibility gives us concrete data on how Temporal appears in LLM-driven search results. We can see which topics and prompts to optimize, how we compare to competitors, and how to stand out. We use it daily to dominate the LLM search landscape.

Using Amplitude’s AI capabilities makes it easier for our teams to self-serve answers, validate ideas, and prioritize efforts across marketing, product, and sales. By integrating our event taxonomy with AI, we understand what drives adoption, retention, and expansion, without waiting for analysts to crunch the numbers.

There’s a nice symmetry here, too: Amplitude uses Temporal to power some of its AI features, and we use Amplitude’s AI insights to improve how we’re discovered and adopted. It’s a smart cross-pollination and testament to the value of our companies working together.

Scaling with our eyes open

Thanks to Amplitude, we’ve moved from “startup mode” to a sophisticated, data-driven operation. Best guesses are gone. In their place is an experimental mindset where every Temporalite can validate ideas in real time. More than anything, Amplitude helps us make the right investment decisions by showing where to spend time, money, and effort for the greatest impact on customers and the business.

With Amplitude, we make choices with our eyes wide open. We are now better equipped to deliver a developer experience that’s just as resilient as the code our customers write.