How Amplitude is expanding their PMF through User Adjacent Theory

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Welcome back to another edition of TheProductLed!

This week, we’re talking about expanding your product-market fit (PMF). While finding PMF is a major milestone, it’s not the end of the road. Over time, as you start to reach the late majority of your company growth curve, you must find new ways to expand your growth. If you don’t expand, you ultimately become outdated, outcompeted, or disrupted.

Amplitude just released Guides and Surveys. This innovative feature is an in-app AND time-based messaging capability, which directly competes with its integration partners like Pendo, Userflow, Appcues, and many others.

Why is this exciting to talk about? Well, now, the same growth and product teams using Amplitude to track user behavior and report on key metrics can also onboard users, announce features, and collect real-time feedback—all within Amplitude.

This isn’t just a feature drop. It’s a PMF expansion play built to increase stickiness, fuel growth, and embed Amplitude even deeper into product and growth workflows.

And there’s a lot we can learn from it, so let’s break it down!

Estimated time: 7 minutes

Table of Contents

• Why you need to expand PMF

• Ways to expand PMF

• Expanding PMF through User Adjacent Theory (UAT)

• Identifying when to solve for adjacent users

• How to tell that you have the potential to unlock UAT

• Amplitude’s adjacent user opportunity

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Why expanding PMF is the key to sustainable growth

When you first find PMF, growth comes fast. You solve a clear problem, customers flood in, and momentum builds. You add features, improve UX, remove friction, optimize growth loops, and scale. But as a company matures that exponential growth levels off. The market saturates, expectations rise, and competitors start creeping in. The same incremental optimizations that once fueled growth? They don’t unlock the next level.

You’ve hit the saturation ceiling.

To keep growing, your PMF will need to evolve and expand.

And to be clear, this isn’t a failure. It’s part of the lifecycle of any successful product and is a good problem to have. But it is a challenging problem to solve.

Ways to expand PMF

When companies hit this ceiling, they have a few levers they can pull:

1. Expand your market within your existing product → Same product, different audience: Take what you’ve already built and expand it to a broader audience, whether that’s a whole new industry, company size, global market etc.

2.  Expand your product within your existing market → Same audience, solve adjacent problems: Own more of the workflow by solving additional pain points for your core users, making your product even more indispensable.

3. Diversify → New product, new audience. Building something entirely new for a totally different customer segment.

Amplitude chose Path 2—solving an adjacent problem for its existing users to expand deeper into its current market.

This was a strategic move based on User Adjacent Theory (UAT).

Expanding PMF through User Adjacent Theory

User Adjacent Theory (UAT) comes from Bangaly Kaba, former Head of Growth at Instagram. It’s the idea that the fastest way to expand PMF isn’t chasing a new market. It’s solving for adjacent users.

What are Adjacent Users?

Your user ecosystem is made up of:

• Core users → The people you built your product for.

• Power users → The most engaged users who get the most value from your product.

• Adjacent users → People who have tried your product but haven’t fully adopted it because something is missing.

Adjacent users aren’t complete strangers. They’re the people who make it part of the way through your user journey but, for some reason, get stuck.

They see value and might even use the product, but you haven’t tapped into their full potential.

What’s holding them back? 

There’s some kind of friction preventing them from fully adopting the product:

• Missing functionality: something they need to complete their workflow doesn’t exist.

• Reliance on third-party tools or workarounds: they have to stitch together multiple solutions, adding cost and complexity.

• Disjointed experience: they struggle to keep everything in sync across multiple platforms.

When do you need to think about solving for adjacent users?

Expanding into adjacent user needs isn’t something you decide to do randomly. It should be timed to drive your next stage of growth when your core market starts reaching saturation.

For SaaS companies, early growth often comes from serving innovators and early adopters. As they move through the market curve, they penetrate the early and late majority, but eventually, growth slows as they approach the laggard stage or hit a PMF ceiling.

You’ll know it’s time when:

• You’ve captured your core audience: You’re reaching diminishing returns in acquisition.

• Your activation and retention rates are stable: You’ve optimized the funnel for your existing base.

• Your market is saturated: You’re no longer seeing 10x growth from your original ICP.

This is when you need to go deeper into your existing audience by solving more of their workflow and addressing more of their needs.

How to spot UAT opportunities for PMF expansion

To find these gaps and unmet needs, start by digging into your customers' Jobs to Be Done (JTBD).

Your users aren’t just there to use or buy your product. They have broader goals and responsibilities tied to their role. The key to unlocking high-impact UAT opportunities is understanding:

• What exactly your customers are trying to accomplish

• Where they hit friction

• What tools they’re duct-taping together to fill the gaps

When you map this out, you’ll start spotting the adjacent problems your product is perfectly positioned to solve.

What this meant for Amplitude

Amplitude customers are data-forward product and growth marketers who rely on the platform to track, analyze, and understand user behavior to drive adoption, engagement, and revenue.

But their JTBD goes beyond just analytics. They also need ways to influence user behavior, optimize, and impact the growth model. Growth teams are constantly up against retention, conversion, and expansion.

Some key Jobs to Be Done:

• I need to understand how users interact with our product so I can identify friction points and optimize their journey.

• I need to ensure new users experience the core value of the product quickly so they don’t churn.

• I need to segment users based on behavior so I can personalize messaging and outreach.

• I need to spot users who are disengaging so I can proactively bring them back.

• I need to understand what’s frustrating or confusing users so I can improve product usability.

• I need to understand what users are willing to pay for so we can optimize pricing.

• I need to surface the right features at the right time so users adopt them.

• I need to gather feedback on pricing models so we can align perceived value with willingness to pay.

Amplitude solved part of the job. However, acting on customer data required third-party tools, multiple subscriptions, and extra work, creating friction and inefficiencies across stakeholders.

This is where UAT comes in.

You expand your PMF by solving more of your core users’ workflow. The more jobs you take off their plate, the more essential your company's value becomes.

Amplitude’s UAT opportunity: analytics → action

Amplitude already has product and growth teams locked in and living in its platform to track user behavior and report on business-critical metrics. But based on those key JTBD, Amplitude customers needed to be able to act on it.

To drive activation, adoption, and retention, teams need to nudge users at the right moments. They need to onboard new users, announce and walk through new features, guide users through fiction points, and collect real-time feedback.

But before Guides & Surveys, users relied on tools like Pendo, Userflow, Appcues, and Chameleon to perform that JTBD.

This created two problems: 

• Core users → Were hitting a ceiling with Amplitude. They had all the insights but needed another tool to act on them. Even if users were satisfied with integrating with a third-party tool, this fragmented workflow increased the risk of Amplitude becoming a replaceable part of a user’s tech stack. Value wasn’t being left on the table. It was handed over to a third-party tool.  

• Adjacent users → Couldn’t justify Amplitude without in-app engagement functionality or really struggled with the fragmented workflow. 

Amplitude solved both these problems at once.

Before vs. After: Amplitude’s PMF expansion move

Amplitude removed the extra steps, consolidated the workflow, and expanded what users can do.

Now, instead of maxing out their use of Amplitude and relying on third-party tools, core users get more value without leaving the platform.

For adjacent users looking for in-product engagement tools, Amplitude is now a tool that solves this use case. This move is HUGE because it can turn both core and adjacent users into power users, all while driving revenue growth.

This shifts Amplitude from a pure analytics tool to a full growth and engagement platform that doesn’t just answer what happened. It helps teams shape what happens next.

The result?

A better product that does more work for their users that breaks through the saturation ceiling to unlock new levels of growth!

TL;DR – expanding PMF through UAT = the easiest way to unlock growth after a plateau

There’s a lot we can learn from Amplitude’s move. Here are the key takeaways:

• PMF isn’t static. Even the best products hit a saturation ceiling.

• Adjacent users can be a low-hanging opportunity. They see value but haven’t fully adopted it. Figure out how to solve their JTDB friction, and they will adopt.

• Solving for adjacent users strengthens your product for everyone. Fix their pain points and your entire user base benefits.

• Your core users’ Jobs to Be Done are your roadmap for expansion. Solve more of their workflow, remove friction, and your product becomes indispensable.

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