Amplitude Pathfinder: How Zach Phillips went from “IT Guy” to Analytics Leader

Amplitude Pathfinders are the quiet catalysts behind real change in Amplitude’s Cohort community. They are the analysts, marketers, founders, product managers, and devs whose often invisible work reminds us: data alone doesn’t move mountains. People do.

Zach Phillips didn’t set out to be an analyst. For a decade, he was “the IT guy,” managing systems, tickets, and teams in higher education. But a stubborn reporting discrepancy pushed him into SQL, and that curiosity eventually reshaped his career.

Today, Zach is a Senior Product Analyst at Appfire, where he manages analytics across a sprawling portfolio of products. From governance frameworks to Amplitude integrations, he’s built the processes that make sense of complexity—and in the process, carved out a career defined by curiosity, persistence, and community.

Beth: To kick things off, can you tell me a little about your role and the company you work for today?

Zach: My title is Senior Product Analyst, but really, I wear a lot of hats. I work for Appfire, which builds a wide range of products in the Atlassian ecosystem. We’re not just a single-product company (we’ve got over a hundred), so my job is to help set and maintain standards for product analytics across all of them. It keeps me busy, but I love the variety.

How did you first get into data and analytics?

I fell into it, which is a pretty common story. For about a decade, I worked in centralized IT management as the classic IT Guy, doing a bunch of different roles.

And then, a funny story: There was a recurring issue with the centralized reporting that another group was publishing. Their numbers never matched what I was seeing, and I just couldn’t reconcile it. So I petitioned for access to the raw tables, ran the queries myself, and somewhere in the process, I figured out what was going on—they were giving everyone a “3 out of 5” on a five-point scale when the customer didn’t answer something.

That single assumption was dragging down our scores, but it wasn’t reflected anywhere in the front end. Once I uncovered that, it really clicked for me: There’s incredible value in going back to the raw data instead of just trusting the reports on the surface.

What happened after that?

I left higher ed in 2023 and joined my first software company. It wasn’t technically my job, but I was deputized to handle much of the reporting and analytics there and really connected with this work. After that, I moved to Appfire and, for the first time, became a formal product analyst.

That’s also where I started using Amplitude—and I’ve basically been immersed in it ever since.

What’s a project you’re especially proud of since joining Appfire?

A lot of my role is backend platform management—so honestly, the boring parts of Amplitude. I know plenty of customers talk about all the great analysis they do, but my day-to-day is more about getting everyone at Appfire to actually use Amplitude effectively.

Instead of a handful of products, we’ve got 100-plus, supported by very different application teams. Many of them had never worked with product analytics before, so Amplitude was their first exposure. My job is making sure baseline instrumentation standards are maintained—whether it’s existing projects that have used Amplitude for years or new products just coming online.

The thing I’m most proud of is managing that chaos. We put a robust documentation and standards process in place, and after some hiccups, the org really bought into it. Now we do annual reviews, we’ve got updated docs, and everyone’s approach is the same. It’s not perfect, but it’s light-years ahead of where we started.

What challenges keep you up at night?

Data management at our scale. Amplitude has been great—there are tons of features to help us—but honestly, the hardest part isn’t Amplitude itself, it’s just getting the data, joining it, and making it useful alongside everything else.

We’re a big enough company that you can stay in the box with Amplitude up to a point—but then it becomes pretty normal for larger organizations to set up a second data warehouse and face all these integration needs.

So most of what keeps me up at night is understanding how we’re going to launch new growth initiatives or product marketing, given the limited information, and all the disparate platforms we have to connect with. I’m sort of the Amplitude integration and “connect-to-other-platforms” guy.

What Amplitude feature do you rely on most?

It honestly changes from project to project. But in my role at Appfire, we’ve really pushed a lot on the backend administrative APIs. Big shout-out to Amplitude on that, because there are a lot of edge cases supported that I never would have thought about when I first started.

Sometimes you’ve got an app that can’t process everything in real time without impacting performance, so you need batch support or delayed payloads. Amplitude has features for that, and we’ve used them a lot. Anytime Amplitude introduces a new API, I’m always excited, because nine times out of 10 it solves some weird problem we’ve been running into.

Where do you look for guidance or inspiration?

Honestly, it depends on what needs to be done. But I will say it’s gotten a lot easier in the last year. Integrations with Snowflake, for example, make things so much simpler—we’re also a Snowflake warehouse user, so that’s a huge win.

Amplitude’s documentation has been great, too. Usually, we just define what we want to do, and then check the docs, and there are two or three ways to accomplish it. Usually, one approach is clearly more practical: cost, simplicity, or minimizing complexity.

There are times when it’s worth writing custom code or building a pipeline, but if we can use something out of the box, we’ll do it. It’s just more consistent, and the built-in Amplitude integrations are surprisingly full-featured.

How has analytics shaped your career path?

Oh, hugely. It was a scary leap from public institutions to private industry. I started my first full-time job before I even graduated from college, and I stayed in higher ed for about a decade. Moving out of that world, you hear all these stories about how much harder it is in the private industry. Not that it isn’t hard, but there are also a lot of great things—more flexibility, more variety.

I got my Master’s in 2019 with a focus on data analysis, which was my first real exposure to the technical side. And when I left higher ed, analytics gave me the foothold I needed. I was able to cut my teeth in that first private role, learn a lot on the job, and eventually move into my formal analyst role at Appfire.

And honestly, there’s a massive industry out here around analytics, with all kinds of roles—some more visible, some less talked about, like data governance. I end up telling people about that a lot. It’s not always glamorous, but it’s critical, and it keeps me plenty busy.

What skills have you developed that you didn’t expect?

Two stand out—first, data engineering. Working closely with our warehouse team has forced me to level up fast. When you’re moving millions of records a month, you learn quickly.

Second, communication. I spend a surprising amount of time explaining concepts and writing documentation. But once you get into the weeds, it’s easy for teams to get lost.

I’ve basically been perpetually practicing explaining how Amplitude works, how identification and group calls work, and writing documentation to help new teams. And honestly, I’ve gotten good at it just from sheer repetition.

How do you communicate the value of analytics to people who aren’t data-savvy?

It depends on the persona. Product managers, for example, often know their product inside and out, but they don’t always know where to start with analytics. That’s where our baseline standards come in.

At Appfire, when we acquire a new product, a lot of those teams are seeing product analytics for the first time. So instead of asking them to reinvent the wheel, we say, “Here’s the baseline. Just implement this; it’s been tested across hundreds of products.”

Once they see even something as simple as a page-view event flowing into Amplitude, the lightbulb goes off. Suddenly, they’re coming back with a long list of other things they want to track. That first taste of live data makes all the difference.

How has being part of the analytics community impacted your work?

It’s been huge. Being a tech person, I’m used to fast-moving changes, and analytics has been the same. New tools, new approaches—it changes overnight sometimes.

I stay plugged in everywhere: forums, social media, community posts. Amplitude’s monthly release notes are always a source of inspiration, because we’ll often have an idea sitting on the shelf, and a new feature release is the moment we can finally put it into production.

And just like I’ve learned from the community, I try to give back. I’m not the charting wizard some folks are, but when it comes to governance or integrations, that’s where I can help.

What advice would you give someone just starting with Amplitude?

Honestly? Read. The number of times I thought I’d found some new problem, only to discover Amplitude had a doc or a blog post about it from four years ago…it’s humbling.

Start simple, use the training resources, and when you run into a wall, always check the docs and the community. Most of the time, the answer is already out there.

And finally, if you could build any feature for Amplitude, what would it be?

Oh gosh. I’d probably show up on a most-wanted list for Amplitude PMs. But if I had to pick one, it’d be more support for group properties.

We’re a B2B company, so groups are critical to us—there are features currently available for user sessions that I’d love to see for group sessions as well.

Amplitude already does a lot, but I’d love to see some of the features currently available for users extended to groups. That would open up a ton of possibilities for us, and we’d probably wear it out the minute it shipped.

Beyond flashy dashboards

“Once they see even something as simple as a page-view event flowing into Amplitude, the lightbulb goes off. Suddenly, they’re coming back with a long list of other things they want to track. That first taste of live data makes all the difference.”

Zach Phillips’ journey shows how analytics leadership is often less about flashy dashboards and more about governance, documentation, and scaling processes that keep teams aligned. At Appfire, his ability to manage complexity has transformed chaos into clarity—and that’s what makes him a true Pathfinder.