Discover how Brandon Khoo, Senior Product Manager at Amplitude, navigates the challenges of balancing feature depth, customer expectations, and platform stability while driving innovation in the fast-paced world of digital product management.
In this exclusive interview, we sit down with Brandon Khoo, Senior Product Manager at Amplitude, to explore the intricacies of digital product management in today’s fast-paced tech landscape. With a background spanning roles at Uber and KPMG, Khoo shares his journey and the diverse experiences that have shaped his approach to managing Amplitude’s insights-driven customer data platform.
We delve into his challenges in balancing feature depth with innovation, managing broad customer expectations, and maintaining platform stability amidst continuous advancements. Khoo also provides valuable insights into how strategic goals are defined, how integration infrastructure is built to support a robust partner ecosystem, and how customer feedback drives impactful product development.
Finally, he highlights the importance of staying updated with the latest technological trends and shares his structured approach to solving complex problems in product performance and user experience.
Excerpts from the interview;
As the Senior Product Manager for Amplitude’s insights-driven customer data platform, what are the most significant challenges you face in your role, and how do you address them?
As the Senior Product Manager for Amplitude’s insights-driven customer data platform, I navigate several key challenges that are critical to ensuring Amplitude’s success and delivering value to our customers:
- Balancing Feature Depth and Differentiation: A key challenge is balancing enhancing existing features with developing new, differentiated features that keep our platform competitive. While it’s crucial to deepen our core capabilities, such as expanding integrations and data handling capabilities, we must invest in innovative features that distinguish us in the market. This requires ensuring that enhancements or new features can be reliably repeated and scaled, a crucial aspect of sustaining growth in a B2B environment. I address this by carefully prioritizing initiatives based on customer needs, strategic goals, and potential impact, always with an eye on repeatability.
- Managing Customer Expectations Across a Broad Feature Set: The nature of a Customer Data Platform (CDP) means that it covers a wide surface area, encompassing everything from data collection and identity resolution to audience building and marketing orchestration. Customers often expect comprehensive solutions that excel in all these areas, which can lead to high expectations. The challenge lies in delivering robust and well-integrated features across this broad spectrum while managing what is feasible within our roadmap. To tackle this, I focus on clear communication with customers about what Amplitude excels at, particularly those areas that align with our company strategy. This involves prioritizing initiatives that drive our core objectives while being transparent about what we are not focusing on now. By ruthlessly prioritizing and setting realistic expectations, we ensure our development efforts are focused and impactful.
- Ensuring Platform Stability Amid Rapid Innovation: Maintaining the platform’s stability is a significant challenge as we continuously push the envelope with new features and innovations. Customers rely on Amplitude for real-time, reliable insights, so any disruption can have serious consequences. A specific area where this challenge is evident is in our event streaming capabilities, which are crucial for sending events and properties downstream with minimal latency. Amplitude targets an end-to-end p95 latency of 60 seconds to meet customer expectations, monitored and supported by proactive alerts. I collaborate closely with engineering to ensure this performance target is consistently met, allowing us to innovate while maintaining the high level of reliability our customers depend on.
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Can you share your journey from working at Uber and KPMG to becoming a Senior Product Manager at Amplitude? What key experiences have shaped your approach to product management?
My journey to becoming a Senior Product Manager at Amplitude has been shaped by diverse experiences that have significantly influenced my approach to product management.
At Uber, I served as an operations manager in the courier experience team, focusing on enhancing the experience of couriers delivering Uber Eats across the US and Canada. My role was centered around being the voice of the customer—specifically, the couriers—ensuring their feedback was integrated into product decisions. This approach was pivotal in developing and launching the Uber Eats Loyalty program and various retention initiatives, significantly boosting courier engagement and satisfaction. Additionally, I applied this customer-first mindset to co-found Uber Moments, an experience-based marketplace on Uber Eats. Uber Moments achieved high user and host satisfaction and garnered widespread media attention, highlighting the importance of innovation and cross-functional collaboration. These experiences solidified my belief in the power of aligning product initiatives with customer needs to drive meaningful outcomes.
Before Uber, my time at KPMG gave me a strong foundation in business strategy and consulting. I worked closely with clients across various industries, helping them solve complex problems and develop strategies to drive growth. This experience taught me to think strategically, understand the broader business context, and communicate effectively with stakeholders at all levels. It also reinforced the importance of aligning product initiatives with overarching business goals—something I carry forward in my work at Amplitude.
At Amplitude, I’ve been able to bring all these experiences together. While using data to drive product decisions is crucial, I always ensure that the voice of the customer remains at the heart of everything we do. We leverage a mix of qualitative insights and quantitative data to get a complete understanding of user behavior, ensuring that our decisions are both informed and impactful. Balancing customer needs with our strategic goals is an ongoing challenge, particularly as we strive to deliver innovative features while maintaining the reliability of our platform.
One guiding principle that I find particularly meaningful encapsulates Y Combinator’s motto: “Make something people want.” It’s a simple idea, but it carries immense weight—building products people love and are willing to pay for. This philosophy reminds me to prioritize understanding our users deeply and delivering exactly what they need. It’s been a guiding force in my approach to product management, ensuring that the products I work on are innovative and truly valuable to our users.
How do you define and prioritize the strategic goals for Amplitude’s customer data platform? Can you provide an example of a strategic decision that significantly impacted the product?
Defining and prioritizing the strategic goals for Amplitude’s customer data platform involves a careful balance between addressing immediate customer needs and aligning with our long-term vision. Our primary goal is to ensure that companies can seamlessly connect what they’re building with their customers’ needs, empowering them to quickly understand how their product investments contribute to their broader business objectives.
We consider customer feedback, market trends, and data-driven insights when setting these goals. We also ensure that our initiatives align with Amplitude’s overarching mission to help companies build better products.
One strategic decision that significantly impacted our platform was the focus on expanding and enhancing our data integration capabilities. Recognizing the growing need for robust and flexible data handling, we prioritized several key initiatives:
- Building a Developer Portal: We launched a dedicated developer portal to provide our users with comprehensive tools and resources. This portal empowers developers to build on Amplitude’s platform, facilitating easier integrations and customizations. By providing detailed documentation, API references, and code samples, we made it easier for developers to extend the functionality of our platform, driving greater adoption and enabling more complex use cases.
- Cohort Webhooks: We introduced Cohort webhooks to allow customers to automatically trigger actions based on user behavior and cohort membership. This feature was designed to give our users more control and flexibility in their marketing and product strategies, enabling them to integrate Amplitude data more deeply into their existing workflows and third-party tools.
- Event Streaming to Pub/Sub and Kinesis: Understanding the importance of real-time data processing, we implemented event streaming capabilities to Google Pub/Sub and AWS Kinesis. These integrations allow our customers to stream event data directly into their preferred data warehouses or analytics platforms with minimal latency. This strategic initiative has been crucial for customers who require immediate insights from their data, enabling them to react swiftly to user behavior and market changes.
These decisions were driven by customer demand and the need to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving market. By prioritizing these integrations and tools, we’ve significantly enhanced the flexibility and scalability of Amplitude’s platform, allowing our customers to tailor their use of Amplitude to better fit their unique needs.
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What are the key considerations when defining the integration infrastructure for Amplitude’s partner ecosystem? How do you ensure seamless integration with various partners?
Amplitude takes pride in helping partners extend their digital footprint and drive business growth. As a member of the Amplitude Partner Ecosystem, companies receive access to the latest training, resources to support sales teams, and a network of like-minded partners. This ecosystem has been thoughtfully curated and comprises solution and technology partners dedicated to growing the digital business landscape, including Amplitude’s Open Ecosystem partner integration portal, launched this past June.
An Open Ecosystem helps facilitate and accelerate integration development. The portal allows technology partners to access tools and resources, including documentation, code samples, and best practices, to guide teams through necessary integration steps.
How do you leverage customer insights to drive product development at Amplitude? Can you share a specific instance where customer feedback led to a pivotal change in the product?
Listening to customer feedback and understanding their business challenges are critical at every stage of product development. The most valuable insights often come from early signals—whether customers suggest new integrations or express frustration with existing solutions. These inputs guide our research and help us align development efforts with immediate needs and broader business goals. Ultimately, your customers’ success is your own, and in today’s environment, retention is key to sustained growth.
One example was the recurring customer request for more flexible data handling capabilities. Rather than simply wanting more out-of-the-box (OOTB) connectors, customers asked for webhooks to allow them to build custom solutions, especially where they needed extra transformation capabilities in the payload structure. This flexibility was crucial for customers who needed to format, enrich, or filter data before sending it to their downstream systems.
We prioritized the development of Cohort Webhooks and Event Streaming, incorporating the necessary payload transformation features. These tools have become some of the most popular and versatile ways to export data from Amplitude. This customer-driven development has been pivotal in enhancing our platform’s ability to meet diverse and evolving needs, especially for those requiring complex data transformations. It shows how listening to our users can lead to widely adopted and impactful solutions.
How do you stay updated with the latest technological advancements in product management and data platforms? Can you share a recent technological trend that you find particularly exciting?
Staying at the forefront of technological advancements is essential in my role. I regularly follow data-focused substack newsletters such as Run the Business by Ibrahim Bashir, Lenny Rachitsky, Databeats by Arpit Choudhury, Technically by Justin & Benn Substack by Benn Stancil, which provide fresh perspectives and insights into emerging Product and Data trends in the industry. At Amplitude, we also have dedicated Slack channels where team members share the latest news and innovations, fostering continuous learning. We also hold weekly PM crit sessions to level the Product Manager’s craft, discussing how emerging technologies can be leveraged to drive outcomes for our customers.
One recent technological trend that particularly excites me is the growing role of AI in automating and optimizing marketing experimentation. Instead of marketers manually creating campaigns and workflows, AI now handles the heavy lifting—automatically testing and refining strategies across various channels. What stands out is how AI can learn and adapt in real time, making precise, individualized decisions that significantly enhance customer engagement. This shift transforms how we use data and AI to deliver personalized experiences at scale, making marketing more efficient and effective.
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Can you describe your process for analyzing and solving a complex problem related to product performance or user experience?
When addressing a complex problem related to product performance or user experience, I follow a structured approach grounded in the double-diamond framework for product management. This method allows for thorough exploration and targeted solution development, ensuring we address the core issue effectively.
- Discover: I start by leveraging Amplitude’s powerful quantitative capabilities to gather data and analyze user behavior at scale. This helps identify patterns, anomalies, and potential areas of concern. Additionally, I use qualitative insights through session replays to better understand how users interact with the product. By combining these quantitative and qualitative insights, I can uncover the root causes of the problem, providing a comprehensive view of the user experience.
- Define: With the insights gathered, I narrow down the focus to define the core problem clearly. This phase is critical for aligning the team on the specific issue we must address. By clearly articulating the problem based on data and user feedback, we ensure that our efforts are directed toward solving the most impactful issue.
- Develop: In the development phase, I work with cross-functional teams to brainstorm and prototype potential solutions. We experiment with different approaches, using further data analysis and user testing to iterate quickly. The goal is to refine the solution until we find the most effective way to address the problem.
- Deliver: Finally, we implement the chosen solution, ensuring it meets user needs and solves the problem effectively. Post-launch, we monitor key performance indicators through Amplitude and continue to gather user feedback to make any necessary adjustments, ensuring that the solution delivers value.
