What is product intelligence?

For many SaaS companies, getting an accurate view of how their products are performing with customers is the Holy Grail of analytics.

While user data can reveal basic information like the number of daily active users, a product’s most-used features, and any errors that users encounter, it only tells part of the story. Your customers are leaving valuable bits of data in other systems and sources outside of your product itself.

This additional data is the missing piece to getting a more complete view of your customers’ relationship with your product. With it, you can move beyond basic usage statistics and start extracting bigger insights that impact the business, such as:

• What product attributes make an offering more attractive to potential customers, and which features will make them stick around?
• What user-level insights can enable your marketing team to deploy more targeted customer campaigns?
• Which potential new product features should be prioritized to drive the most revenue?

Product intelligence is the key to answering these and many other business-critical questions.

What is product intelligence?

Product intelligence is the process of gathering, analyzing, and acting on data related to how customers use your products. It relies on combining product data and operational data to drive product development and improve product experiences. This additional data means your analyses are based on a more complete picture of how customers interact with your product, and you can uncover new insights you would not have surfaced from product user data alone.

One of the challenges of implementing a strong product intelligence strategy is that the data required to derive actionable insights often lives in multiple silos. User behavior data and product metrics, for example, must be combined with customer data from other sources such as CRM systems, marketing tools, and customer experience apps. When all of these data sources are integrated for analysis, the true power of product intelligence can be harnessed.

What makes a product intelligence platform?

Unlike traditional business intelligence tools, which are typically used to provide a high-level overview of general business metrics and analytics, product intelligence tools home in on product performance and product analytics specifically.

You might think these analyses are only valuable to product managers and product designers, but almost every business department can benefit from having access to product intelligence. Sales can have more effective upsell conversations with power users. Marketing can create more targeted campaigns for new users stuck in the onboarding funnel. And customer success can identify potential at-risk customers when product usage trails off.

Because of its usefulness across the organization, an ideal product intelligence platform provides an easily accessible, collaborative environment in which data can be aggregated and analyzed by multiple teams. And it makes the latest usage data and statistics available in real time, so that decision-makers always have the most up-to-date product information at their fingertips.

Product intelligence tools

Fortunately, there are many analytics solutions that are purpose-built to deliver the insights stakeholders need to make informed decisions. Tools like Pendo, Optimizely, Amplitude, and others excel at aggregating and displaying analytics data in multiple ways to meet the needs of sales, marketing, product, and engineering teams.

However, these tools are only as good as the data they have access to. Your investment in a product intelligence platform will only pay off if it delivers a holistic view of the customer experience both in-product and throughout the rest of the customer lifecycle. If the data needed to obtain these insights is missing or incomplete, the usefulness of your product intelligence initiatives will be diminished, if not eliminated entirely.

How data integration powers product intelligence

Stitch’s product intelligence solution supports a range of data sources needed to create product intelligence, including:

• Amplitude
• FullStory
• Heap
• Intercom
• Marketo
• Mixpanel
• Optimizely
• Pendo
• Salesforce

As well as all of the major cloud data warehouse destinations:

• AWS Redshift
• Google BigQuery
• Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics
• Snowflake 

And you can use any popular analytics tool to create product intelligence reports and dashboards:

• Mode** 
• Google Data Studio
• Looker
• Microsoft Power BI
• Tableau 
• ... and

Ready to learn more about how to maximize your product intelligence investment? Chat with one of our experts today and learn to grow from siloed product metrics to a full GTM data hub!