More than 1700 organizations use Amplitude—and within every one of those accounts, there are pioneering data-seekers creating charts, sharing insights with broader teams, and taking action based on the data. Today, we’re honoring 25 of the most innovative Amplitude users in the second annual Pioneer Awards.
These customers unlocked insights using Amplitude to make their customers’ lives better. They learned more about what they need to work, bank, eat, shop, and live smarter. Whether working with existing or new products, these teams innovated to meet their customers where they are: online. And by adapting to new behaviors, they reshaped their organizations and their businesses.
This year’s Pioneer Award finalists have impressive accomplishments across marketing, data, product, engineering, and analytics. These visionaries have a relentless focus on maximizing efficiency and better understanding their customers. They take risks, use data to drive change, motivate and empower teammates, and build products with an impact.
The finalists of this year’s Pioneer Awards were selected by our panel of expert judges including growth leader Elena Verna, product evangelists John Cutler and Adam Greco, VP of Product Management, Ibrahim Bashir, and Professional Services Manager Jessica Chiu. All of the honorees stood out for the ways they harnessed the power of customer data to guide innovation and build exceptional digital products.
We are thrilled to announce the following 25 finalists of the 2022 Pioneer awards. Winners will be announced around Amplify, Amplitude’s annual conference, happening next week, May 24-26 in Las Vegas.
Amplitude 2022 Pioneer Award Finalists
Pioneer of the Year
Patrick Gordon, Head of Growth at JUMBO Interactive: Patrick leads from the front, — making changes to support Jumbo Interactive Ltd from being a lottery company to being a technology company. With Patrick’s work, the JUMBO Interactive team can reliably measure growth loops, measure bets with leading indicators, and confidently say “that worked” or “that didn’t work and here’s what we learned from it”. We’re using ML-powered recommendations and predictive modeling to ensure they are putting the right message, at the right time, to the right people. He aided the organization to build competency and data literacy across multiple disciplines – Product Management, Growth Marketing, Engineering, and Customer Success.
Spondon Hazarika, Senior Product Manager at Showcase IDX: Moving from Google Analytics to Amplitude, the Showcase IDX team had no data-driven way to identify a path forward or measure progress on a granular level for product issues. They also had plans to introduce a new Agent Experience product line focusing on bringing agents into their consumer ecosystem. We kicked off an initiative to find and integrate such a data platform, and Spondon was handed the reins.
Philip Mason, Vehicle Data Control Center VDCC – Product Group Owner Manager at Ford: Starting from zero, Phil led the team to instrument the features most desired by senior leaders and product owners we surveyed. Now, over just 3 quarters, they have the ability to deliver 450+ KPIs and over 50+ individual project dashboards.
Jennifer Prasol, Digital Insights and Optimization at Dell: An expert user of product and marketing analytics tools, Jennifer has been integral in helping her organization at Dell adopt Amplitude Analytics for its digital teams. When Jennifer originally joined Dell, she was on a team that was highly focused on Dell’s B2B digital experience and events, but with COVID, events changed dramatically and Jennifer was able to champion for real time analytics to report on how her team’s events were doing from a user experience perspective. Never before had her team been able to see in real-time the attendees in a virtual event; Now with Amplitude, Dell’s digital teams are able to see customer actions and align that with the KPIs that are most important to the Dell team.
The Data Culture Award
Claire Armstrong, Director of Digital Product at Fender: Claire was instrumental in instilling a data-first culture for Fender Digital. Since mid-2021 she took over as the Data team product lead and made our data usable, reliable, and available. She’s led internal seminars to explain data and the proper processes to stakeholders across the organization, she’s created Amplitude dashboards for learnings and features, helped implement tracking plans for new properties and features, and has made data “make sense” to people at all levels across the Fender Digital world.
Nicholas Threapleton, Lead Product Analyst at Culture Amp: As Culture Amp grew significantly, Nicholas helped pivot their product culture from ‘ask the customer what they want’ to ‘find out what they need’ with self-service insights. There is now a clear shift in data culture, with 60% of the product group now using Amplitude each month; Rather than analysts asking teams to track data, they do it proactively because they care about having it available.
Konstantinos Anagnostou, Senior Product Analyst at SmartRecruiters: Using Amplitude Analytics for our product analytics needs, Konstantinos has been the greatest advocate of moving more and more of event data to Amplitude so that the SmartRecruiters team can take data-informed decisions. This initiative has been such a success, that the monthly usage increased 950% in 12 months.
Somas Thyagaraja, Director of Product Management at SoFi: As a product leader, Somas decided that SoFi had to be data-driven. He recognized that everyone has individual perspectives and opinions on what content and utility the user must see, but only data could truly and objectively guide the team to best serve their members. To achieve this, Somas institutionalized a systematic way to standardize, modularize, and measure all content equally, built almost 100+ dashboards to understand and distill those that matter, and built a decision-making framework based on visualized data.
The Growth Architect Award
Connie Crossley, Principal Product Manager at SoFi: Connie spearheaded the product’s entire feature roadmap focused on driving growth, engagement, and retention. This has encompassed everything from determining “A-Ha moments” during user journeys, to architecting push notification strategies, to bringing members back into the experience.
Emmanuel Boros, VP of Growth at Leal: When Emmanuel joined Leal, only 2 data scientists had the required skills to do database queries in order to extract raw data that could then serve for more sophisticated analyses. This resulted in a number of challenges and limitations for the entire team. To solve this issue, Emmanuel became the main ambassador and “evangelist” for the implementation and adoption of Amplitude. He spent a significant amount of time with each team to understand the business and product questions they had and trained them on how to answer those questions. Now, marketing, product and tech teams, sales, operations, customer success and finance all leverage Amplitude for their data needs.
Clare Blessen, Director of Business Intelligence at nate: Clare’s efforts on the data and analytics front have been instrumental to growth at nate. At the core of every decision—product priorities, marketing spend, design tweaks—has been the analytics Clare has built from the ground up. She aided the nate team in realizing the biggest customer drop off points within the product, targeted ads more effectively, all in a simple and self-serve fashion enabling teams with information to make the right decision to help nate grow.
The Product Innovation Award
Bernard George, Co-Founder and CEO at Tornado: Bernard has led usage of Amplitude, which has been a crucial tool as Tornado identifies, ideates and executes impactful strategies toward bettering financial education for their community. As they launched a new product last fall, Amplitude served as an important resource to help their company understand which education modules resonated most with different types of investors, based on their experience level. Utilizing Amplitude’s segmentation and funnel charts, as well its retention analytics and depth of engagement analysis, his team designed product lesson plans through a data-driven lens, with the ability to personalize and tailor features for each cohort of customers.
Mark Brenneman, Senior Product Manager – Growth at Shift: Mark boldly encompasses a “data-driven PM”. He seeks to understand his users through their behavior and outcomes, in addition to other qualitative measures through surveys and other research. Mark consistently sets clear measurement objectives for his projects, drives instrumentation consistency, and uses data to support his product decisions. Mark’s focus on using data has unlocked Shift’s SEO efforts, driving substantial organic growth, while also enabling us to iterate more rapidly on product changes.
Terra Moran, Product Manager at Liteboxer: For their product launch, Terra used Amplitude to quickly identify opportunities and iterate features based on user behavior and feedback. Being able to analyze user behavior on a feature-by-feature basis over time helped make decision making fast and data-driven, based on what their users cared about most.
The Customer Impact Award
Kayle Schiele, Senior Customer Success Specialist at Field Nation: With Amplitude, Kayle and her team built dashboards and reports to quickly see user adoption and usage at scale. They now target customers and communicate in a more meaningful way, which in turn allows them to be more meaningful with each client/user and in turn increasing trust, engagement, usage, adoption, and more.
Dan Fennell, Director of Customer Marketing & Advocacy at Highspot: Dan has used Amplitude as a key tool to identify and recruit customers who are using advanced capabilities and extracting high value from their use of Highspot. What was originally implemented to help the Highspot product team get data driven feedback on how our products perform, Dan and team now use as a tool in marketing to predict customer advocacy, identify compelling customer scenarios and innovate how Highspot enables customers to showcase their stories of business transformation.
Catherine Valui, QA Manager at BPmobile: Catherine led the unification of a User ID across all statistical apps, as well as the addition of User ID in the places where BPmobile success team would interact with users that faced issues. This process has become much faster and easier to find users in Amplitude and investigate the issues that arise. Now, bugs are fixed more quickly, and our users are satisfied, as they receive fixes with updates faster.
The Marketing Insight Award
Naomi West, Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Invoice2go: Since discovering Amplitude in 2019, Naomi has leveraged email engagement events, such as email clicked, or email opened, and connect them with events that are passed into Amplitude by Invoice2go’s CDP, Segment, in order to create robust funnel dashboards that shed light on really how marketing drives behavior outside of the inbox.
Pilar Cardenas, chief growth officer at Meditopia: Pilar created a 360 approach to leverage retention information to crack further acquisition. Pilar and the Meditopia team unlocked major journeys through data with Amplitude events and data visualization. Additionally, they have been able to made strides in churn prevention, which has reduced churn by 17%. They now know which users by their actions and engagement are more likely to churn, can churn or will for sure churn.
Sheena Green, Director, Digital Insights & Analytics at Mint Mobile: Sheena has made direct, positive impacts on acquisition and retention Marketing KPIs and helped generate a deeper and richer understanding of their users to provide the best experience possible. Sheena’s work has helped to increase CVR by 84% for a specific media channel, increase newsletter sign-ups by over 900%, and increase referred purchases by 50%.
Lauren Polinsky Director Website Optimization at Housecall Pro: In just six months, Lauren has shifted marketing team conversations away from Google Analytics-first to Amplitude reporting for many of Housecall Pro’s ongoing marketing campaigns. With Amplitude, her team has been able to complete website experiments to inform us of website optimization opportunities. And, because Amplitude monitors both our marketing website and app behavior, they have been able to use data to find meaningful content opportunities for the website.
The Product-Led Award
Forrest Miller, Principal Product Owner at SoFi: He took a data driven approach to identify where he and the engineering team could drive maximum business impact. Already an expert using Amplitude from his years of experience working with SoFi’s Communications team, Forrest worked quickly to stand up new dashboards for the Affiliates team, delivering key insights on where they should invest their precious engineering bandwidth.
Maxime- Berthelot, Head of Growth at Walkie-Talkie: Maxime’s first task at Walkie-Talkie was to implement Amplitude to bring a data culture to the company. They were facing a retention issue and thanks to his work, they were able to turn it around in less than 5 months and are now showing top of the industry retention numbers. Maxime worked very closely with design and engineering teams to provide daily guidance on product feature utilization, cohorts analysis and user engagement.
Aadi Sharma, Manager, Enterprise Product Data & Analytics at Tempo Software: As a leader in team time management software, the Tempo team understands that logging time is not always an enjoyable exercise. Using Amplitude reports, Aadi identified that it takes the average user a certain amount of time to log each time record. Pairing data from Amplitude with research done with churned customers, Aadi and team found that by optimizing the time it takes to log time we could improve our product and user experience. They offered users to link their calendars and integrated development environment with Tempo and offered these activities as time record suggestions to end users. Thereby providing a semi-automated yet non-intrusive way to track time. This feature was released to our customers in June 2021 and the results were phenomenal.
Alan Hili, Product Manager at Jumbo Interactive: Alan utilized Amplitude’s full suite of products (Analytics, Experiment and Recommend) to nurture and grow the Lotto Party product and Powered by Jumbo Platform — leaving no stone unturned.
Please join us in celebrating these amazing Amplitude Pioneer Award finalists! Winners will be announced next week at Amplify, Amplitude’s annual conference.
Want to hear stories like these from other Amplitude Customers? Check out Amplify, the top product and growth conference.
