Product analytics in horizontal SaaS is well-solved territory. Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap — track events, build funnels, analyze cohorts. The tooling is good.
Vertical SaaS product telemetry is more complex, for reasons specific to the vertical context: compliance restrictions on what can be tracked, workflow complexity that doesn't fit into standard event models, and the need to connect product behavior data with business outcome data in ways that horizontal analytics tools don't support well.
The vertical SaaS telemetry stack:
HIPAA-compliant event tracking for healthcare SaaS. Standard analytics tools are not HIPAA-compliant by default. Healthcare SaaS companies need either a HIPAA-compliant analytics platform (Pendo offers this, as does a custom warehouse-first approach) or a careful data architecture that keeps PHI out of the event tracking pipeline.
Industry-specific outcome tracking. Horizontal analytics tells you what users did. Vertical SaaS telemetry needs to tell you what outcomes were achieved. A construction SaaS needs to track not just "project created" but "project completed within budget" and "schedule variance." A legal SaaS needs to track "contract reviewed" and "high-risk clauses identified." This requires building outcome tracking that's product-specific and instrumented from the start.
Workflow completion metrics that account for industry process variation. A standard funnel analysis assumes a linear flow. Legal workflows, healthcare workflows, and financial services workflows are branching, exception-heavy processes. Your telemetry needs to capture the full branching structure, not just the happy path.
Benchmark-level aggregation across customer cohorts. The vertical advantage of owning industry data requires a data architecture that can anonymously aggregate outcomes across customers to generate industry benchmarks. This is a distinct telemetry requirement from single-customer analytics.
Build the telemetry stack before you build the features that require it. Retrofitting is always 3x more expensive than building correctly from the start.