Scaling Our Culture To Support Massive Growth

Here at Amplitude, our workforce is brought together by a shared goal: helping our customers disrupt their own digital practices. Everyone on our team—from marketing to product to sales and more—is focused on helping our customers answer the question, “How does my product drive my business?”

It’s a mission that has resonated with the marketplace, and brought Amplitude to the point of massive global growth. In 2020, we expanded our workforce by 24%. In 2021 already, Business Insider named us a top “enterprise startup to bet your career on” and G2 selected Amplitude as one of the best software products. We’re actively hiring for more than 100 roles, and our passionate customer base features some of the most innovative companies across media, retail, fintech, and SaaS.

In every aspect, Amplitude is a rocketship. But while hyper growth is exciting, we recognize the perils that can come with scaling so quickly. Far too many companies have fallen into the trap of neglecting the employee experience as more and more employees are onboarded every day. Part of what has always set Amplitude apart from other companies is the spirit of our organization—a culture led with the values of humility, ownership, and growth mindset, from the leadership team and throughout every department.

While there are many reasons why I joined Amplitude as the first Chief People Officer last month, foremost among them is the opportunity to grow people, teams and the company. Part of that growth is the values which have been at the foundation of the culture.

As Amplitude scales, I’m leading our team to be intentional about nurturing our culture. Our focus on our values is what has brought our customers and employees to this amazing success, and it’s our values that will bring us to the next stage too.

Embracing Our Values

At Amplitude, we’re careful to reinforce our values regularly, including by recognizing “value award winners” among our employees each quarter. Here are just a few ways that we think through those values, and how they come into play in our work:

Humility

For our team, humility is all about checking our egos at the door. We recognize that we all bring certain strengths and perspectives to the room, and we’re not on a mission to prove ourselves over each other. We’re here to listen, share ideas without judgment, and work together around a shared mission even when it means deferring to a different strategy than the one we presented. At a leadership level, humility also comes through in our weekly town halls. We’re transparent with where we’ve exceeded expectations or missed targets, and we have open conversations about what we think we can do to improve.

Ownership

Ownership means that we take the initiative to solve problems that drive our shared company success. We see ownership demonstrated when an individual thinks about a problem beyond what it means for them personally, and tackles the issue in a way that drives outcomes for customers, the company, and the team at large. One way we see ownership across the company? Sales and engineering teams working together to optimize new features (with the added benefit of sharing new perspectives) rather than dismissing each other as “opposing” ends of the workforce.

Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is essential to ensuring every employee at Amplitude can advance their career. With the value of growth mindset, we encourage our employees to continue actively learning in their roles, and take the steps to acquire new skill sets. At a startup—and a hyper growth company at that—things can change rapidly. We’re adding new customers, introducing new features, and asking our ever-expanding employee base to learn more every day. At a leadership team, embracing the value of growth mindset means that we create opportunities for our employees to continue their learning, both in their career paths and in other areas—such as diversity, equity, and inclusion—as well.

Creating Great Companies Is All About Nurturing Culture

Amplitude’s incredible culture is a major part of why I joined the team as the first Chief People Officer. As a team leader, few things are more exciting than when an entire org comes together to solve a big, juicy problem that affects countless businesses. Amplitude is growing so fast because we’re uniquely positioned to help companies of all sizes understand their customers, place their digital bets, and achieve business value.

As we tackle the enormity of this problem, we know we need to grow, scale, and do things differently. Just as we ask our customers to engage in digital disruption, so too can we rethink how we work and build upon our foundation. I’m confident in our ability to lead through the change, specifically because of our core values.

As our co-founder Jeffrey Wang has shared before, at Amplitude, “We live by our cultural values and invest in people over everything else.”

Interested in joining Amplitude? We’re hiring! Check out our careers page today.