Celebrating Amplitude’s 2022 Pioneer Award Winners

I’m excited to share the winners for the second annual Pioneer Awards in seven categories—Pioneer of the Year, Data Culture, Customer Impact, Product Innovation, Growth Architect, Marketing Insight, and Product-led. These Amplitude users’ nominations were rated exceptionally highly 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.

This year’s Pioneer Award winners 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.

We are thrilled to announce the following nine winners of the 2022 Pioneer awards.

Amplitude 2022 Pioneer Award Winners

Pioneer of the Year

Patrick Gordon drove meaningful changes for players at JUMBO Interactive.

Why Patrick won: For the past two years, Patrick Gordon, Head of Growth at JUMBO Interactive, has been focused on moving JUMBO Interactive into modern product and growth development and marketing practices. These changes have supported Jumbo Interactive as they transitioned from a lottery company to a technology company.

The company had lofty ambitions for value to customers and shareholder value. Introducing Amplitude to the business has changed the conversations to be less “I think because of my experience…” to “We think because the data supports our hypothesis…” Using data, experimentation, and personalized ML-powered recommendations allows JUMBO Interactive to cut through those biases.

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.” The result has been a mindset shift, and an eagerness to replicate this across our recent M&As, driving value across the group of products and platforms, and really compounding the growth to date.

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn.

Philip Mason led using live connected vehicle data to provide extraordinary business value at Ford.

Why Phil won: Starting from zero, Philip Mason, Vehicle Data Control Center (VDCC) Product Group Owner Manager at Ford led the team to instrument the features most desired by senior leaders and product owners they surveyed. Through the use of Amplitude, product planning, quality cost reduction, and reductive design to name a few areas captured during this pioneering effort. Given the large scale of the corporation and the number of team members involved, the individual effort necessary to drive and make this sort of company change is extraordinary. In order to strive for adoption and pivot the entire product development team toward a single data strategy using Amplitude, it required alignment from all levels of leadership. Now, over just 3 quarters, they have the ability to deliver 450+ KPIs and over 50+ individual project dashboards.

Connect with Phil on LinkedIn.

Jennifer Prasol connected virtual event reporting to the attendee experience at a global technology organization.

Why Jennifer won: An expert user of product and marketing analytics tools, Jennifer Prasol, Digital Insights and Optimization at a global technology organization, has been integral in helping the digital team adopt and implement new tools. When Jennifer originally joined her organization, she was on a team that was highly focused on her team’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. Through Jennifer’s efforts, the digital teams are able to see real-time customer actions and align that with the KPIs that are most important to the organization.

Connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn.

The Data Culture Award

Claire Armstrong instilled a data-first culture for Fender Digital.

Why Claire won: Claire Armstrong, Director of Digital Product at Fender was instrumental in creating a data culture for Fender Digital. In mid-2021 she took over as the Data team product lead and made Fender’s data ecosystem clean, usable, reliable, and available. She leveraged a framework outlining a three-phase approach to cleaning up and building a long-term path to better data.

Since those initial steps she has helped others with creating tracking plans, auditing broken or poorly instrumented tracking events, shepherding fixes through the process, and reliably communicating progress against the goals set for the data initiative. She’s led internal seminars to explain data and the proper processes to stakeholders across the organization, 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.

Claire’s efforts in cleaning up the data and creating tracking plans have made Fender capable of running reliable reports in Amplitude to gauge the efficacy of products. For example, she worked on a tracking plan and audit for the sign up process. Afterward, the team was able to implement “Sign in With Google” and found that they decreased sign up abandonment by 10%. This is huge, as nearly 40% of accounts were created with that method.

Connect with Claire on LinkedIn.

The Customer Impact Award

Kayle Schiele created the tools for team members to effectively communicate with customers at Field Nation

Why Kayle won: Kayle Schiele, Senior Customer Success Specialist at Field Nation was tasked with an initiative to increase the rate of adoption of Field Nation’s platform of new tools and features. At the time, her team did not have a clear understanding of what their users were clicking and using within the platform. They knew this hefty task would require understanding key pieces in order to find success in increasing adoption. This meant asking questions like “What features are users utilizing today and what are they not utilizing in their day-to-day operations?,” “How often are they using these features?,” and “How do we define what adoption means versus usage?”

In order for us to ensure to meet their goals, Kayle and team knew they needed to understand their users’ most common challenges, what tools aligned in helping fix those challenges, and what potential roadblocks they could face in users adopting these tools. To select these target users, Kayle and team built out reports within Amplitude and documented the current usage rates. After understanding the current usage, they then set up an email campaign for the Customer Success team to send out emails to these specific users. In these emails, they included the value each feature could bring, a video/article/how-to link, and a way for the user to schedule a meeting with the CS team member to discuss further. After each email send the team waited two to four weeks to check Amplitude reports and understand what impact the emails/CS team has had.

They now target customers and communicate in a more meaningful way, which in turn allows them to be more meaningful with each client and in turn increases trust, engagement, usage, adoption, and more.

Connect with Kayle on LinkedIn.

The Growth Architect Award

Connie Crossley drove growth, engagement, and retention for Relay at SoFi

Why Connie won: Connie Crossley, Principal Product Manager at SoFi spearheaded the product’s entire feature roadmap for SoFi’s Relay product — focused on driving growth, engagement, and retention. Relay is a critical part of SoFi’s overall growth strategy, however, in order to unlock growth, the team needed daily and hourly visibility into engagement and activation data with Relay features. Before using Amplitude, this data was not clear, or in some cases, unavailable. To top it off, they had delayed information, which meant product managers, engineers, and data scientists were not able to easily create reports or see progress.

Connie’s use of Amplitude contributed to Relay’s enormously successful growth of its user base by a 175% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) since its launch in 2019. Connie used Amplitude to identify new opportunities to grow usage within the SoFi member base, ensuring everyone could find value in the product. As an early-stage product, getting clear views of activation funnels and quickly analyzing dropoff quickly with Amplitude was key to transforming the flow and allowed the team to continuously iterate on the user experience.

Recently, the team has focused its strategy on financial readiness and launched Relay’s Credit Score Monitoring and debt tracking features. Connie used Amplitude to identify improvements to these features that resulted in compounding growth quarter-over-quarter and over 2x growth year-over-year, running and monitoring experiments through Amplitude along the way.

Connect with Connie on LinkedIn.

The Product Innovation Award

Bernard George at Tornado

Why Bernard won: Bernard George, Co-Founder and CEO at Tornado 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.

Connect with Bernard on LinkedIn.

The Marketing Insight Award

Sheena Green generated a deeper, richer understanding of the users at Mint Mobile

Why Sheena won: Sheena Green, Director, Digital Insights & Analytics at Mint Mobile has made direct, positive impacts on acquisition and retention marketing KPIs.

Before Sheena started in her role, insight into how marketing messaging was being consumed and how Mint Mobile’s products were being utilized was minimal. To solve this, Sheena spearheaded the implementation of Amplitude and has effectively surfaced user behavior insights at all phases of the customer journey, empowering stakeholders to make more strategic, data-driven decisions.

She met with stakeholders to understand their attribution and attribution tracking needs; she created a list of technical requirements and worked with developers to ensure they were correctly capturing the necessary information. In Amplitude, this data allows Sheena’s team to go beyond the surface-level acquisition metrics provided in advertising platforms. Using Amplitude, they are now able to see not only which channels are driving traffic to their site, but how these different channels behave on their site as well.

Additionally, the retention team recently offered a referral incentive to current subscribers in an attempt to increase the number of referred purchases. To start, Sheena and team used Amplitude to determine baselines for subscriber referral rate, referred traffic distribution, and referred traffic CVR. They then tested different messaging and incentives to uncover what actually motivates referral behavior change. They found that while previous incentives were in fact increasing subscriber referral rate, they did not impact the distribution of referral traffic to the website. However, from added testing they saw that one particular messaging and incentive combination motivated both the referrer and the referee, resulting in an increase for all three KPIs. Overall, Sheena’s work has been impressive—helping to increase CVR by 84% for a specific media channel, increase newsletter sign-ups by over 900%, and increase referred purchases by 50%.

Connect with Sheena on LinkedIn.

The Product-Led Award

Forrest Miller tested and implemented improvements to grow the lending business at SoFi

Why Forrest won: Forrest Miller, Principal Product Owner at SoFi 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.

Using Amplitude-based analysis and experimentation, Forrest ruthlessly prioritized the team’s backlog to focus on the opportunities with maximum revenue-generating opportunities, ultimately identifying an underperforming part of the core user experience. He and the team then leveraged Amplitude’s experimentation capabilities to test improvements which ultimately grew SoFi’s lending business. This impact was unmatched within the company for a lean team, and Forrest’s product leadership, experience with experimentation, and data-driven approach were critical in driving this outcome.

Connect with Forrest on LinkedIn.

Please join us in celebrating these amazing Amplitude Pioneer Award winners!