Announcing Amplitude’s 2020 Pioneer Award winners

For digital businesses, there was no year more critical than 2020. Teams that moved quickly to a digital-first approach and scaled up were rewarded with incredible growth and results. Whether working with existing or new products, these teams innovated to meet customers where they are: online. And by adapting to new behaviors, they reshaped their organizations and their businesses.

With our Pioneer Awards, Amplitude not only celebrates these impressive accomplishments but also the data, product, engineering, and analytics leaders who relentlessly focus on maximizing efficiency and better understanding their customers. These visionaries take risks, use data to drive change, motivate and empower teammates, and build products with an impact.

The winners of our inaugural Pioneer Awardswere selected from more than 1,000 customers, 60,000 teams, and 100 nominations by our panel of expert judges. All of the honorees stood out for the ways they harnessed the power of customer data to guide innovation and build exceptional digital products.

“Over the past year we have witnessed a tectonic shift, where digital-first is no longer a lofty goal, but a reality of business survival” said Jennifer Johnson, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, Amplitude. “Our Pioneer Award winners are true leaders, innovators, and natural champions of this digital-first shift, demonstrating the power of product analytics to deeply understand the digital customer in new ways and translate customer value to business growth. We congratulate each of these winners for representing the highest standard for companies looking to make the digital-first leap.”

We are thrilled to announce the following winners of 2020 Pioneer awards.

Amplitude 2020 Pioneer Award Winners

The Data Culture Award

Mary Alfheim, Product Analytics Lead, HBOMax: Faced with a large and complex organization with numerous technical dependencies across its many teams, Mary successfully and tirelessly advocated for bringing self-service insights to HBOMax. Her accomplishments included breaking down barriers across data breadlines and complex raw data systems.

Stefan Partin & Stefan Rijkaart, UX Research Data Scientists, Qualtrics: Stefan Partin and Stefan Rijkaart were relentless in their pursuit to enable their colleagues to understand the value of using data in their decisions, solicit buy-in across the organization, and completely transform how their teams work. They helped cross-functional teams go from qualitative to quantitative decision-making and created an environment where all stakeholders feel empowered.

The Growth Architect Award

Chad Meeks, Manager of Data Products, Movies Anywhere: Chad successfully navigated unique challenges as he embarked on a journey to build a data-informed culture at his company. He united thirteen different teams, with different use cases and technical skills, empowering them to make data-driven decisions with Amplitude.

Muhammed Qureshi, Data Analytics Architect, IBM: Muhammed provided his organization with complete, trustworthy, and actionable data as it launched a new tech preview. Muhammed worked to ensure his internal teams had a consistent data model for events and event attributes, mapping the data to the organization’s schema and filling gaps when necessary. In just three months (despite the COVID-19 pandemic), IBM had tooling, instrumentation, and reporting in place as its tech preview became available.

The Product Innovation Award

Josh Stephens, VP of Product, Current: At the onset of the pandemic, Josh saw a huge opportunity to help people when they needed it most: top-line discounts and savings on their everyday purchases. In July, Current became the first mobile bank in the U.S. to launch a points rewards system based on debit purchases. Current members can now earn up to 15x points on their purchases at over 14,000 merchants, such as Subway, Rite Aid, True Value, and Cold Stone Creamery. Using Amplitude, Josh and the Current team were able to track all events and usage of the Points product, in order to make business decisions on how to improve the product, to inform and determine needs of product marketing campaigns and build targeted customer cohorts for marketing efforts.

Miguel Navarro, Head of Voice and Emerging Platforms, TD Bank: During the height of the pandemic, Miguel used real-time data from Amplitude to not only solve COVID-related banking problems but also mobilize and improve a Virtual Assistant (VA), taking it from idea to production in just three weeks. He quickly gathered a team and began the work to stand up the VA, which now lives on TD’s “Contact Us” page. This user-friendly VA uses the most-accessed FAQs to answer quick inquiries. By putting the Virtual Assistant in such a high traffic space, Miguel was able to redirect visitors to self-serve their issue first.

The Product Impact Award

Rayen Magpantay, Product Manager, Atlassian: Rayen is responsible for Jira, the most-used Atlassian product. Given the wide adoption of this product, making any product change to it can be tedious. Rayen used Amplitude to understand events that correlate to a particular cohort and its primary actions. This helped Rayen weigh the impact of each product change and build features that drive uplift in adoption.

Aarón Zajac, Customer Analytics and Optimization Analyst and Rosalba Nunez, Customer Analytics & Optimization Specialist, Volaris: As owners of Volaris’s A/B testing and personalization, Aaron and Rosalba use data to create different experiences and glean insights. With real-time insights and analysis from Amplitude, Rosalba and Aaron make same-day improvements. .

Please join us in a virtual round of applause for our ten Amplitude Pioneers. All winners have the opportunity to speak at Amplify 2021, the largest worldwide event for product and growth leaders, and a winners’ celebration package.

Want to nominate yourself or a colleague next year? Visit the awards site to learn more about the Amplitude Pioneers Awards, and see all of the 2020 winners’ stories.