Our work with Ditto
Outlier partnered with Ditto, a Series A startup offering a headless CMS for product text, to implement a modern data stack.
We empowered Ditto to drive product development with data-backed insights, enabling them to define and track crucial metrics relating to user activation.
Overview
Ditto is a B2B SaaS platform that serves as a headless CMS for product text, helping companies manage and centralise product copy.
Founded in 2020, Ditto streamlines the process of handling all text within digital products - from user interfaces to documentation. They are a team of 15, have already secured Series A funding and are now positioning themselves for continued growth and product improvement.
Situation
The catalyst for Ditto’s data transformation came when the fast-growing go-to-market team identified the need to understand and improve new user activation.
Despite Ditto’s growth, the company’s existing data infrastructure was ill-equipped to answer fundamental questions about user behaviour and product adoption.
Key challenges included:
Undefined activation metrics: Ditto struggled to pinpoint which user actions truly indicated successful product adoption.
Data silos: Information was scattered across multiple tools (Mixpanel, Retool, SaaS Grid, Intercom, Stripe), making it almost impossible to get a holistic view of the user journey.
Untrustworthy event data: Event tracking, via Segment, had been implemented piecemeal since launch, resulting in a large number of events with variable trustworthiness.
Limited analytical capabilities: The team couldn't perform the complex analyses needed to understand activation patterns and their impact on long-term retention.
Inadequate reporting for growth and product development: As Ditto approached a major product redesign, they needed to significantly improve their data hygiene and reporting capabilities to make informed decisions.
I was logging into Mixpanel, Retool, SaaS Grid, Intercom, and Stripe just to piece together a bit of a story. We had no way of even figuring out if people were doing the core actions that make Ditto valuable.
– Ellie McCandless, Product Marketing Lead // Ditto
GOALS
Ditto partnered with Outlier to address these challenges and set up a scalable data infrastructure.
The key objectives of the project were:
Establish clear metrics that accurately represent successful product adoption within the first 90 days of user onboarding.
Consolidate data from multiple tools (Mixpanel, Retool, SaaS Grid, Intercom, Stripe) to create a holistic view of the user journey.
Provide the product team with actionable insights to guide feature prioritisation and improvements based on user activation patterns.
THE SOLUTION
DATA STACK EVALUATION & IMPLEMENTATION
We implemented a modern data stack tailored to Ditto's user activation tracking needs:
BigQuery for data storage
Dataform for data modelling
Hashboard for visualisation and analysis
ACTIVATION METRICS DEFINITION
We set up Dataform to model Ditto's data from various sources and worked with their team to define five core actions indicating true user activation within the first 90 days. This enabled easy tracking of:
Users completing each core activation action
Overall activation rates
Time to activation for different user segments
CUSTOM ACTIVATION DASHBOARD
We created a Hashboard dashboard to track the newly defined activation metrics, allowing the team to monitor activation rates in real-time, identify bottlenecks in the process and start hypothesising on what improvements could be made.
IMPACT
The implementation of a modern data stack and user activation analytics has fundamentally transformed Ditto's approach to product development and decision-making.
Data-Driven Decision Making: Ditto transitioned from relying on gut instincts to making informed choices based on user behaviour data. This shift has been crucial as the company grows and matures.
Strategic Roadmap Development: Insights from activation data now drive Ditto's product roadmap, ensuring development efforts focus on features that truly drive user adoption.
Targeted Product Redesign: Data insights directly influenced a major redesign of Ditto's product. The team identified that one of their five core activation actions had very low adoption, skewing their activation data.
Company-Wide Data Visibility: The impact of the data project extends beyond the product team. Ditto now discusses key data insights in their weekly all-hands meetings, creating a data-informed culture across the organisation.
