Amplitude Pathfinder: How Saish Redkar Mentors Analytical Passion in Others

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. 

Today, I’m chatting with Saish Redkar—former data product manager turned Senior Customer Success Architect at Amplitude, Amplitude super user, and the most prolific Amplitude community contributor.

Known for his knack for “magically whispering to” product data to reveal insights that are actually useful, Saish has built and scaled 0-to-1 product analytics stacks at organizations serving millions of users. He’s a firm believer in ruthless data governance, always prioritizing the “why” behind the numbers before ever drafting a tracking plan.

But what takes Saish to the level of Amplitude Pathfinder isn’t just his technical expertise—it’s his passion for mentorship and his ability to guide teams to be truly data-informed. Whether he’s helping someone get unstuck in their analytics journey or championing best practices, Saish continually raises the bar for his team and the Amplitude community.

Beth: What is your data story? And how did you get started?

Saish: Growing up, I was a huge cricket fan and was always fascinated by cricket stats like top scorers, top wicket takers, averages. Looking back, that was the first real dataset I dove into.

On the work side, after my bachelor’s degree, I joined an IT services firm in Bangalore, India. That’s where I used SQL for the very first time to run financial reports for clients. I’ve been obsessed with data ever since.

When did you first start using Amplitude?

It’s a funny story, actually—back in 2017 at SketchUp, I was in charge of creating and maintaining a master product metrics dashboard for our weekly business review using Google Analytics and Google Data Studio (now Looker Studio).

One of our acquired companies was using Amplitude on a very small scale as their primary analytics tool and reporting numbers like monthly active users. I had to somehow include those numbers in my Data Studio dashboard, and since there wasn't any direct integration back then, every Monday morning I would manually update a Google sheet with the Amplitude numbers and refresh the Data Studio dashboard for the numbers to update.

I honestly didn’t realize the actual value proposition of Amplitude until SketchUp switched to a subscription model. Because we had a multi-portfolio product suite, we needed to build an end-to-end analytics platform to monitor metrics and understand how users behaved across our products and subscription bundles. This marked the beginning of my long-standing relationship with Amplitude.

And you were in charge of rolling it out to the rest of SketchUp?

Yes, that’s right. I was SketchUp’s first full-time data hire. I basically had to learn the ropes of the product analytics trade and Amplitude from scratch in order to build out the company’s data function.

During that time, I sharpened my Amplitude practices, learned how to use first principles thinking in motion about product and user behavior analytics, and learned proper scalable system design in order to handle telemetry for 15 million plus monthly active users.

What’s one Amplitude feature you couldn't live without, and how do you use it?

I’m gonna go with two different charts—the Event Segmentation chart and the Lifecycle chart.

I use the Event Segmentation chart, or what I like to call the “what are users even doing in our product” chart, to answer so many questions I have about how users are engaging with the product: Are users clicking buttons around your app or using the app in the right way that you intended? Is that shiny new feature you just launched actually being used? Which days or hours are your app’s prime time? Are certain user segments using your product differently? It’s definitely become my favorite hangout spot in the Amplitude UI, without a doubt.

I love the Lifecycle chart for a holistic view of how your users are doing in your product, like a relationship tracker for your users. I use it to see who’s sticking around, who needs a little bit of nudging, and whether our product is turning into a one-hit wonder or a regular habit for our users.

If you could give one piece of advice for someone starting with Amplitude, what would it be?

Start with your questions and not your charts. Amplitude doesn't work like magic if you don't know what you're looking for (although this might soon change with all the AI stuff coming up). Once you have a clear question, Amplitude becomes your exploratory playground.

In my work so far, here’s what I’ve experienced: Tools don't create insights. Your curiosity does. It’s important to use Amplitude to change your questions and not just build pretty charts. (There are other prettier BI tools out there to do that.)

What do you tell people when they say “But I don't know what to ask,” and get very easily overwhelmed by the data? That can be a total blocker—how do we unblock that?

Not everyone thinks about event data day in and day out like we do. It’s essential to know your audience and their relationship with data. From there, you can properly educate them on the building blocks of event data.

To help people understand how to ask better questions, I ask them to think about the product as if they were an end user. Then we can expand that thinking from “Imagine how a user is using a particular flow,” to “How are users generally using this flow?”

Now we’ve got a product question, which leads to "Which chart helps me answer this?"

I’ve noticed that your way of making hard things look easy is a value add for the Amplitude community, helping folks know what good looks like so it feels more achievable. How has being part of the analytics community impacted you?

Seeing how other teams, from small-scale startups to enterprises, use product analytics pushes me to think about solutions on a larger scale. It’s helped evolve my thinking from using a particular tool set or stack to thinking about systems—how different tools interact, how different metric frameworks work, and how you can scale insights.

Also, sharing is a part of leading. Even as an expert in the community, mentoring others and sharing best practices isn't just about giving back—it’s how I’ve clarified my own thinking. Some of my best ideas came up while trying to help someone else with theirs. It's a constant loop of give and get by being part of the community.

You have the hard skills, but what makes you so successful is that you have soft skills too—how do you communicate the value of analytics to stakeholders who aren’t as familiar with data?

When working deep in product analytics, especially at SaaS tech companies, clear communication is pretty much everything. I use Amplitude Notebooks to bridge the gap between data and decisions. It’s where insights become stories that can be easily consumed by stakeholders, even those who aren’t familiar with data. Notebooks let me augment charts with commentary, images, and links. In a world where context is king and attention is limited, this approach not only helps me communicate what the data says but also why it matters.

One thing to remember is that not every individual stakeholder will understand event analytics like you do. The very first thing to do is to ground these stakeholders with the building blocks of your usage data in the most concise manner, things like explaining what user properties are versus event properties.

I try to take on the cognitive load myself and make sure the other person can consume the information easily.

What skills have you developed through your work with Amplitude that you found surprising?

Given the free-form nature of Amplitude, I’m not bound to writing complex SQL queries to analyze event usage data. This gives me the flexibility to ask questions in ways that might not have been possible using traditional BI tools, provided I had the right schema captured with the right context and intent.

Working with product usage data has given me a front-row seat to real user behavior—no opinions, no assumptions, just pure usage patterns generated by Amplitude based on event data.

Most importantly, it has turned me from a data consumer into a data champion. This might sound a bit cliche, but analytics isn’t just about creating dashboards—it’s about enabling smarter and faster decisions and helping others do the same. Whether I’m coaching a marketing stakeholder or teaching funnel drop-offs or collaborating with a PM on feature usage patterns, product analytics has given me the credibility and context to help them understand what they’re doing.

That’s a very on-brand response for you—you seem to really connect with helping people grow. How has mentoring others been part of your journey? How has mentoring others been part of your journey?

Yeah, so I do mentorship all the time. From explaining what an event is to helping someone build their first funnel, the experience is pretty rewarding, and I feel like it’s an added bonus being an Amplitude super user and admin in your organization.

Every time I’ve trained or mentored someone new, I reflect on that famous proverb about “Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” But I have my own revised version: Share one insight with your stakeholder, and you satisfy their data hunger for a day; teach them to get their own insights in Amplitude, and now you have created your very own data monster army.

One interesting observation I’ve made over the years is that every chart has the ability to tell a story, and as the creator of that chart, the stakeholder automatically tends to get a sense of ownership—an analytics ownership. The best part is, it never stops there. You’re constantly creating data insights which have the potential to become their own unique story about the product.

A user’s first aha moment never gets old—it's always special for someone to build their very first funnel or retention chart and realize, “Hey, wait! I can do this without any SQL!”

Mentorship has definitely created ripple effects wherever I‘ve been. Every person I help become confident in Amplitude becomes an internal data champion. They share with others, they ask better questions, and that‘s how analytics maturity grows in an organization—one empowered user at a time.

Can you tell me just one more thing—what drives this giving back and empowering people? Is this something you saw growing up, or what makes you this way?

If you have something in excess, you can‘t keep it without sharing. No matter what, you’ve benefited from the knowledge of others to amass your own knowledge base, right? And when you share it, it just amplifies. I‘m not sure if it‘s something I‘m wired for or something which I‘ve learned along in my career so far.

What‘s next for you? What would be the big challenge and ideal job that you would want to step into, and what kind of change would you want to create?

Definitely building a product analytics function from the ground up or scaling an existing function. I’d love to capitalize on all the learnings I’ve had so far—and all the mistakes I’ve made along the way—to help a company build out another product analytics function.