Amplitude
CASE STUDY:
How Amplitude is Contributing to Digital
Transformation for Yellow Pages
CHALLENGE
As a 100 year old company, how do you
reinvent and transform yourself to stay
relevant in the digital world?
SOLUTION
Data democratization, agile
development and Amplitude are
the pillars of Yellow Pages’ digital
transformation, allowing product
teams to build new digital products
quickly and confidently.
WHY AMPLITUDE
• Product owners and managers
at Yellow Pages have completely
shifted their mindset around using
data: what used to be painful and
constraining has become meaningful
and exciting with Amplitude.
• POs and PMs are more invested in
their goals because they are using
Amplitude to define and track them
independently.
“We’re moving to a model based on data, based on
facts. This is where Amplitude is taking a huge role.”
ALEX MÉTIER
SENIOR MANAGER OF DIGITAL ANALYTICS, YELLOW PAGES CANADA
• Amplitude’s on-site training and
deep-dive sessions for the Yellow
Pages team created a deeper
connection not only with the
software, but the humans involved in
the partnership.
As a 100 year old company, how do you reinvent and transform yourself to stay relevant in the
digital world? Yellow Pages Canada (YP) has been answering this for years. The company that
was once synonymous with print directories is now much, much more than that. Visit yp.ca
and you’ll see a sleek search bar, colorful buttons to download a Yellow Pages-built dining,
shopping or real estate app. You’ll see the result of their complete digital transformation.
But that’s just the front-end.
To understand how the Montreal-based public
company of 2,900 employees has turned into
a successful, digital-first brand, you have to
understand what they’ve done differently on the
back-end.
“What we’ve done is put the product owners in
charge of their own data,” said Alex Métier, Senior
Manager of Digital Analytics at YP. “Product
owners are in charge of defining their own analytics
requirements. If they are releasing a new feature or
improvement, they are thinking about what events they
want to track and the behavior of their users.”
Work like defining KPIs or checking day-to-day metrics
used to be a bottleneck since Alex and his team of
digital analysts held the keys to the data castle. When
YP switched to Amplitude as their product analytics
platform, they adopted a decentralized, pod structure to
product development. All product teams now function in
parallel with Alex and Digital Analyst, Salma Tabatabaee,
to provide support, best practice and training to everyone.
“Amplitude is a game changer at YP
because it has completely changed the
mindset. Now [people] have the ability
to dive deep into their own data on their
own.”
SALMA TABATABAEE, DIGITAL ANALYST, YELLOW PAGES
CANADA
“Amplitude is a game changer at YP because it has completely changed the mindset,” Salma
said. “Instead of people bugging us on a daily basis to have basic data, now they have the ability
to dive deep into their own data on their own.”
A Complete Data Mindset Shift
Before Amplitude, Salma said product owners saw analytics as a necessary but painful part of
their job. Understanding data was not easy or intuitive. It was constraining and cumbersome.
Alex remembers the meeting where he and Salma introduced Amplitude as the new product
analytics platform. “Guys, we’ve selected a new product to change your lives so implement it,
test it, and trust us,” he announced to the team.
Since then, all product teams have started using Amplitude to track day-to-day metrics
in their various YP apps. Alex said he’s excited that POs are starting to ask more advanced
questions and call on the data analysts to discuss interesting cases that enrich the team’s
thinking.
“We’re providing deeper insights instead of just data puking for our teams,” he added.
Creating Data Autonomy and Literacy
Yellow Pages did a fresh implementation of Amplitude on a brand new app with all new event
taxonomy. So when folks from the Amplitude Customer Success team flew to Montreal to
give a training session, they were able to train with YP’s actual data set.
“It was a mind-blowing session for our people,” Alex said. “For the first time, developers, QA
people, product owners and growth hackers were very excited about the possibilities of the
data because they understood it. They were enthusiastic to go deeper.”
Salma and Alex are a shared resource between the many different product squads, small
teams comprised of a product owner, growth hacker, and QA. Salma and Alex are there to
define best practices for data collection, help product owners understand how to define the
right taxonomies, event properties and product requirements.
The squads are autonomous, making independent decisions based on what they’re seeing
in Amplitude, releasing a new version of products every 2-4 weeks based on what they’ve
learned.
“Our key objective for this year is to make sure every product owner manages their backlog
based on decisions they can make with data,” Alex said. “This is why it was so important for us
to partner with an analytics solution that can give easy access to data.”
“Amplitude empowers
product managers and other
end users to explore our
data and answer questions
themselves, allowing
our analysts to focus on
strategic initiatives.”
ALEX MÉTIER , SENIOR MANAGER OF DIGITAL
ANALYTICS, YELLOW PAGES CANADA
Amplitude
www.amplitude.com | [email protected] |
@amplitudemobile