Amplitude Pathfinder: How Josh Leigh Puts People First in Analytics

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.

What’s the secret to building dashboards that actually get used—and keep getting used? For , Performance Analytics Lead at and Amplitude Pathfinder, the answer has less to do with the data itself and everything to do with people.

And Josh should know—he leads Zoom’s entire analytics team in tracking, implementation, data, strategy, experimentation, personalization, performance, analytics and business insights.

Josh’s experience in analytics communities—from to Amplitude’s community to the wider world of data practitioners who freely share knowledge and support—has shaped his fundamental belief about the field. This sense of connection and collaborative learning epitomizes what makes him an Amplitude Pathfinder: the understanding that analytics is, first and foremost, about humans, not just numbers.

Beth: Let’s start with your data story. How did you get started in analytics?

Josh: I was introduced to data in college while studying biology and biochemistry.

One of my professors was doing genomics work—this was back when the Human Genome Project was first kicking off. We were trying to sequence a bunch of plant species to understand the family tree of the plant kingdom, which was still under debate at that point. We partnered with the Human Genome Project for DNA extraction, and then worked with a lab group at UT Austin—a bunch of computer science PhDs—who helped us analyze these huge amounts of genomic data programmatically.

Fun fact: I was actually the first person to sequence the full chloroplast genome of Ginkgo biloba.

That’s so cool! How did you then shift into tech?

I started working for a publisher that had about 80 different blogs and around 200 million fans on Facebook. I ran their testing—we’d test elements like status updates, images, and titles in smaller geographic regions to figure out what combination worked best before posting it more broadly.

Back then, organic reach was huge, so we wanted to capitalize on that. From there, I moved into owning our analytics for the company. Being a publisher, we needed to link DFP (now Google Ad Manager) to understand revenue and RPM per blog article.

That led to content arbitrage—I would buy a click on Facebook for half a penny, and based on our RPM, make eight-tenths of a penny, so a profit of three-tenths of a penny per click. Multiply that by our volume of clicks, and we made really good money every day.

That's like a real-life Office Space story right there, hilarious. How do you communicate the value of your analytics work to stakeholders who might not be familiar with data?

For me, it’s not the data itself—it’s the story and the impact to the business that matters. Being able to understand the business, what stakeholders care about, what they’re trying to answer, and how they’re trying to grow—having that partnership is the best way to communicate data.

Just doing an export or a table or a dashboard often isn’t helpful. What matters is what the data actually means, how it translates to their day-to-day work, and how we can grow certain aspects or identify friction points where customers are stuck. That way, the end-user experience becomes better for our customers.

On their own, dashboards die off after 6 to 12 months. It’s not the dashboard that’s powerful—it’s how to look at it and the story around it. Being able to craft that story so people are more engaged with the dashboard and know how to interpret it is what drives that long-tail functionality.

How do you approach creating dashboards for executives?

I always try to understand what they care about first. What are their KPIs? What do they want to track? How does that tie into our organizational OKRs or corporate KPIs? This helps connect their silo focus to how it impacts both the overall organization and company.

We usually start there, and then I’ll say, “We already have 80% of this data. Let's only add a bit more to our tracking.” When designing the dashboard, the most important things should always be at the top when they first open it. As you scroll down, that’s when you get more detailed and nuanced information.

Once it’s complete, I don’t just share a link—I spend time walking them through it. “This is what this means. This is how to interpret it.” It’s always an ongoing conversation and partnership.

I like your point about starting with the most important information and working down. It’s like a landing page—people drop off as they go down the experience, so you want to convey the most critical stuff first.

It’s always crazy when looking at scroll depth of anything—be it a blog page, home page, or dashboard. Most people don’t make it to the bottom. So always put your core stuff up top. And it may not be just for that stakeholder—their manager might want to check in too, so what do they care about? Make sure that’s addressed at the top.

As you go down the management levels, that’s when people will scroll deeper because they care more about and understand those smaller details.

When working on analytics with teammates, what approaches have you found most effective?

The biggest thing for me is understanding the person. Everybody is different—everybody learns differently and wants feedback delivered differently. Some people want more transparency, some want less. You have to take time to understand who you’re working with, whether it’s people on your team or stakeholders.

I think that’s key for most things in life. My wife’s a teacher, and for her, it’s the same thing—some students do better with written information, others with watching videos. It’s about taking those same concepts into how we deal with analytics and our teammates at work.

If you could give one piece of advice to somebody just starting out with Amplitude, what would it be?

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. That’s true with anything, but especially with Amplitude or any analytics platform. Don’t make assumptions—always ask. Once you get further along your learning path, start to test—send test data into the platform, understand how it appears, how to report, how to pivot, how to tweak things within the platform. But never be afraid to ask questions.

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

The analytics community really kick-started my career. I started out joining the group, and I built my career off of that community. From there, I got involved in the and the Marketing Analytics Council. Having conversations and figuring out how people approach things differently and even understanding that I'm not the only one with certain pain points—knowing we can figure out how to solve things together—those ideas have become the foundation of how I think and work.

I will say—your early feedback in the Marketing Analytics Council was pretty critical there in helping us build that, so kudos to you on that. If you could build any feature for Amplitude, what would it be and why?

I would say some type of event forwarding to replace Google Tag Manager.

I’m not too concerned about the CDP functionality, but the events forwarding and being able to transform data to fit certain formats to actually replace Google Tag Manager would be valuable. And with that, having the ability to monitor responses—ideally, in a perfect world, everything works perfectly, but we need to know how many calls return errors so we can monitor over time and dig in when needed. The ability to move off of Google Tag Manager into a single solution, all within Amplitude—that’s my dream feature.

Is that the biggest piece of your stack that you’d like to leverage Amplitude for that you're currently missing?

I won’t say missing—we use Google Tag Manager, and I’ve been using it for about 12 years now. However, because it’s owned by Google, many foreign governments or state governments see that as a risk. We get a lot of pushback with anything tied to Google, so being able to reduce that risk threshold in the market would be helpful. Anytime you send data to Google or Facebook, it’s always a flag to governments around privacy compliance.

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

Definitely —they’re core to how I think and operate. Having spent so long in Google Analytics where everything was presented in tables, that feature in Amplitude is essential.

Being able to add data visualizations on top of data tables, having scorecards, being able to customize the attribution and build tables—that’s changed how I do … everything.

How has working with analytics shaped your career?

It’s really changed how I handle things—whether I’m parenting, playing sports, or really any problem I come across. I try to pause and step back, like I would with analytics, and ask myself: What’s really going on here? What do they need? What’s the bigger picture?