Growth Notes

Platforms MOC

Tags: web-dev map

Platforms MOC

Date: 2026-08-16

Tools grouped by the job they do. The bar for a note is whether you’d use it or be asked about it — not a quota. Everything else is a name to recognise.

Every note here carries a **Checked** date and is worthless without it. The concepts these tools implement live in their home domains; a platform note describes shape, choices, quirks and limits, never the concept.

Ecommerce

  • Shopify — theme architecture, checkout constraints, the APIs, and where the real extension points are. The platform most of the market runs on, and where your Liquid work sits

Analytics

  • GA4 — the event model, the BigQuery export, sampling thresholds, and the reporting behaviour that surprises anyone arriving from Universal Analytics
  • PostHog — analytics, session replay, feature flags and experiments in one, open-source and self-hostable
  • Amplitude — product analytics incumbent; behavioural cohorting and funnel tooling, and the vocabulary a lot of product teams think in

Collection and routing

  • Google Tag Manager — containers, data layer, triggers, variables, and server-side containers. The deployment surface for most measurement work
  • Segment — one collection API fanning out to destinations, plus protocols for schema enforcement

Warehouse and modelling

  • BigQuery — where ecommerce event data ends up, and the GA4 export’s destination. Slot and storage billing
  • dbt — transformation as version-controlled, tested SQL, with lineage. Effectively the default modelling layer wherever a warehouse exists
  • Looker Studio — free reporting layer, connectors, and its performance ceiling

Experimentation

  • Adobe Target — testing and personalisation in the Adobe stack. A decisioning engine that also runs A/B tests, with its own vocabulary for everything
  • Optimizely — the enterprise heavyweight alongside Adobe Target. The name you’ll meet whether or not you’d choose it
  • VWO — client-side testing with a visual editor, the mid-market default. Merging with AB Tasty [CHECK: completion status and what the combined product becomes]
  • GrowthBook — open-source, warehouse-native, runs experiments on your own data
  • Statsig — engineering-first experimentation and flags. Acquired by OpenAI (September 2025, $1.1bn), still operating independently
  • LaunchDarkly — feature flag management at scale; a release tool more than an experiment tool

Adobe

The suite behind a large share of enterprise CRO specs. Product boundaries and names move, so each note is stamped and the orientation note carries the map.

  • Adobe Experience Cloud — what all the products are, which replaces which, and the renaming history that makes the docs hard to read
  • Adobe Analytics — the enterprise analytics incumbent, and a genuinely different data model from GA4: eVars, props, persistence and allocation, Analysis Workspace
  • Adobe Experience Manager — the enterprise CMS. A content repository with a web framework on top, and the content layer Target personalises
  • Adobe Target — listed under Experimentation above

Lifecycle and messaging

  • Klaviyo — the ecommerce lifecycle standard: data model, flows, segmentation engine. Named directly in most ecommerce growth specs

Experience analytics

  • Contentsquare — enterprise experience analytics: zone-based reporting, replay, journey analysis
  • Microsoft Clarity — free replay and heatmaps, with no volume ceiling worth worrying about

Hosting and edge

  • Vercel — deployment for framework front ends, preview environments, edge functions
  • Cloudflare — CDN, WAF, Workers, and the edge platform underneath

Names to recognise

Look them up when they’re in front of you: Convert, Kameleoon, DuckDB, Apache Iceberg, ClickHouse, Recharge, RudderStack, Snowflake, Metabase, Mixpanel, Heap, Algolia, Klevu, Contentful, Sanity, Storyblok, Netlify, Hotjar, FullStory, Braze, HubSpot, BigCommerce, WooCommerce.

Borders

The concepts these tools implement, filed by domain.

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