Francois Ajenstat joined digital analytics software firm, Amplitude as chief product officer just over a year ago, responsible for product strategy and direction, ultimately ensuring the best possible products are developed for customers to drive growth.
Prior to Amplitude, Ajenstat spent 13 years at business intelligence and analytics software company, Tableau, which transitioned from start-up to publicly listed company, acquired by Salesforce in 2019. Ajenstat has also held various product roles with Microsoft.
“One of the reasons I joined Amplitude was my passion for building great products, which I’ve done for the last 20 years of my career. I also love the power of data to help companies make better decisions now and into the future,” he told Retailbiz in a recent interview.
“Amplitude essentially enables organisations to understand how to use data to build better products and experiences. It’s an exciting opportunity to help those creating applications, websites or digital experiences deliver better solutions and improve user engagement.”
From his past experience with Tableau, Ajenstat believes that in order to be successful, every person needs to become a data person.
“At Tableau, we democratised data because we wanted to reduce barriers and empower people with data. We took a simple idea of data visualisation and made it an industry-wide movement to transform the business intelligence industry,” he said.
“I’m bringing that same mindset to Amplitude because there’s still too many companies that don’t have access to this capability and don’t understand what it means. We look at how we can democratise this space, making it more accessible to drive the path forward.”
Amplitude works with several retailers that are focused on delivering great experiences for customers to ultimately to bring them in store – whether it’s the physical store, online store or mobile store. They also spend a lot of time driving customer acquisition across all of these channels.
“What we hear from retailers is, how do I attract the right users and ensure they navigate my experience so that they keep coming back? This means they’re looking for insights into the customer journey – what drives conversion, why carts are abandoned, and what they can do to move consumers along the purchase funnel,” Ajenstat said.
“We know it’s no longer just about the physical experience, the digital experience or the omnichannel experience. The retailer wins or fails based on the quality of the customer experience.”
Amplitude doubles down on local investment
In Australia, Amplitude has been accelerating its investment in the local market, bringing in talent to help customers learn how to build digital analytics solutions to drive transformation. Mark Drasutis recently joined the company as head of value for Asia Pacific and Japan, with deep expertise on value engineering.
“We’ve also been investing in partnerships in the region to drive new solutions and partnering with technology vendors like AWS, Snowflake and HubSpot,” Ajenstat said.
“One unique aspect about Australia and why we’ve increased our investment in the region is that some of our first customers were founded in Australia like Atlassian, Safety Culture and Zip, and they have all been great advocates of Amplitude. They’ve set the pace for what’s possible in the region and shown others how to build great products.
“We’re also investing in the product itself to help customers build better products and experiences, which includes a broadening of Amplitude’s offering. Historically, we’ve been viewed as a digital analytics platform helping people understand the customer and behavioural data behind their products.
“We’ve expanded to not only include product but marketing analytics and experimentation. We’ve added session replay capabilities to combine quantitative and qualitative analytics capabilities, as well as enabled deeper integrations to connect the data in Amplitude with the applications used by our customers.”
The convergence of product and marketing
According to Ajenstat, often the word product is only linked to the physical product; however, for many organisations, the person that owns the digital experience is there to create the best customer experience and influences where and how to invest in those areas.
“Are you investing in the right capabilities that drive the right results? How do you build the roadmap to know where to invest? For instance, do you need a mobile application? Can you build on the platforms and integrations you already support to drive further engagement?,” he said.
“With more visibility across marketing, product and purchase experiences, it creates a single journey which is more important than ever. As product and marketing roles converge and these functions become part of a combined strategy, it’s critical they have shared responsibility of the customer experience.”
Looking to the 12 months ahead, Amplitude wants to accelerate the convergence between product and marketing to break down the barriers between teams so they can deliver better customer experiences.
“This means being able to achieve visibility into the entire customer journey and sales funnel. AI is something that will impact every single company, whether you’re a retailer or a solution provider. But if a customer is engaging with a chatbot, how do you know it’s a great experience? You need analytics to help guide you. From our standpoint, we want to provide more automated insights and actions so that Amplitude can do more of the heavy lifting on behalf of our customers.”
Data linked to culture
Ajenstat recognises that retailers have long been advocates of the power of data and using data to better understand product and marketing strategies.
“As retailers move from physical to digital channels, the customer journey becomes less tangible. I believe the most important thing is to build the data culture, empower people with data and use the data for decision-making. There’s still a huge opportunity for businesses to make more decisions based on data,” he said.
“It’s one thing to understand the data, but it’s another to know how to act upon it. Often the data and the action are disconnected, which creates friction. In October 2024, Amplitude acquired Command AI to integrate its user assistance platform to drive customer success by adding capabilities that help our customers by enabling them to intercept a bad customer experience in real-time directly in the product.
“Many people are drowning in data but are lacking insights and this gap is often related to culture. Does a company have the right culture that encourages exploration? It’s also about skills; while you might have aspirations, if people don’t have the right skills to analyse data, then they won’t do it. That’s why we want to democratise data and make it easier and more accessible.
“There can also be technical challenges. Data quality continues to be challenging for customers in their ability to identify the same user across multiple channels. The lack of data quality results in a lack of trust in the data. Lastly, speed is critical. Data analysis can often be slow, frustrating and time consuming, which is again why we need to make it fast and simple to enable more people to want to do it.”