Amplitude Pathfinder: How Glenn Vanderlinden Builds Data Solutions like LEGO Bricks

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 speaking with Glenn Vanderlinden, Co-Founder at Human37, a customer data strategy agency in Brussels, and a verified Amplitude Pathfinder.

It’s Glenn’s self-taught technical expertise, hands-on approach, and commitment to “solutions over slides, always” that make him a true pathfinding presence. By approaching analytics as a collection of LEGO bricks that can be configured in countless ways, he‘s been able to tackle challenges that might seem insurmountable to others—like migrating one of Europe’s largest ecommerce platform’s entire analytics infrastructure from GA4 to Amplitude across 60+ countries in just three months.

Along with his professional work, Glenn is a very active member of the Cohort community, where he’s become known for his thoughtful pauses before delivering mind-blowing insights (we talk about that more below).

Beth: How did you get started in data?

Glenn: I got intrigued by digital analytics about 10-12 years ago. Back then, Google Ads—it was called AdWords at the time—felt like you were managing investments.

You’d receive budgets from clients to spend on keywords, put it out there, analyze performance in Excel, and then redistribute your portfolio based on the results.

That’s how I fell in love with using data to make decisions and improve outcomes or KPIs. I began seeing analytics as a technical puzzle built out of LEGO bricks. The same solution could be built with different types of bricks—the outcome might be the same, but the shape could be different.

So you started off as a performance marketer? I’ve worked with you in the Cohort community for years and always thought your story was more technical, and then you moved into data as a data engineer and architect. How did you get your technical chops?

Honestly, through self-learning. My dad was a computer programmer who emphasized self-education, so I guess I inherited that mindset. I remember my first programming language was R—technically challenging with horrible syntax, but rewarding because you could immediately see results.

My coding skills are probably non-existent now, but I’ve retained that mindset of using and reusing concepts and bricks—LEGOs—from elsewhere to solve new problems.

When did you start using Amplitude?

About five years ago.

Back then—this was before launching our company Human37 four years ago—I was deeply involved with Universal Analytics (UA), the standard analytics tool at the time. I loved pushing its limits and understanding how each component worked.

Then Google Analytics 4 (GA4) came out and, well, it wasn’t the best product, which created the biggest opportunity in digital analytics in the last decade. The market was force-migrated to a solution most people didn’t understand or like, which opened space to explore alternatives. That’s how we ended up trying Amplitude.

What’d you think of Amplitude when you first started using it?

It opened my eyes to the power and value of event-based analytics and how the platform can do the heavy lifting if your event structure is properly built. All of that was very hard to explain in the context of GA4, because it wasn't necessarily doing that job very well.

I feel it’s still hard to explain, isn’t it? How do you explain event-based analytics to people so they understand it?

The easiest way to explain this is to show it. Understanding event-based design is crucial for future success, but they need to see it.

You can explain it a million times perfectly to a customer or prospect, or you can ask them what user story or business question they're trying to solve.

Mimic that business question using a proper event taxonomy and then show it. That’s the easiest path.

Tell me about a project you’re especially proud of.

Two projects stand out. One client that was already on Amplitude was losing trust in the data. They were asking, “Why do we use Amplitude? What is this thing? How do we use it?” We could see them moving away from self-serve analytics and data-driven decisioning back to gut feeling.

We stepped in and helped them upskill their understanding of digital analytics so they could rediscover the value that data could bring. That team’s now growing based on the analytics implementation we’ve done on Amplitude, and they’ve renewed their contract.

The second project is obviously where we migrated off GA4 to Amplitude in just three months across 60+ ecommerce countries with 20-30 simultaneous users. We handled the technical migration, specifications, QA, and onboarding—it was intense.

What’s one Amplitude feature you can’t live without?

Funnels, for two main reasons. First, keeping properties constant in funnels allows very granular analysis—you can see if a specific product added to cart was actually the same one that was purchased, not just that an add-to-cart event was followed by a purchase.

Second, I love pushing clients to think about conversion windows, because in the Google world, metrics like ecommerce conversion rate were predefined by the vendor. With Amplitude, customers must decide what conversion rate means for their business. For example, a product team might set a KPI of “80% conversion rate for signups under three minutes.” It’s powerful but can be tricky for ecommerce teams since longer windows increase conversion rates. These debates force people to think critically about metrics they’ve been using in their business. That’s what I love—seeing their analyst minds start to turn on.

Usually customers leave those conversations thinking, “Oh my God, my entire reality just shifted because that rate is not what I thought it was.”

What skills have you developed through your work with Amplitude?

When I started with AdWords, I was very focused on being well prepared, like I’d read all the documentation and still felt underprepared because I didn’t know everything. Working with Amplitude is shifting my mentality from “I need to know everything” to “I need to know concepts, be able to connect them and then figure things out very quickly.”

I’ve become more relaxed about the fact that I don't necessarily know everything, but there’s a high likelihood that I will be able to find it out. That’s a very important thing I’ve learned—sometimes you just don’t know something, and that’s fine. It becomes a learning opportunity. If we can’t answer on the spot, we’ll get back to it. It probably means we’ll get two people together at the office—someone might share a question we’ve never had before, and another person will say “Tell me more,” and that’ll start a fruitful debate that everyone can learn from, which is great.

We’ve done so many office hours together, and there’s always that moment when someone asks you a question and then you just go … silent, deep in thought. What’s that pause about? What are you doing in that pause?

Yes, it’s a solution-building process. I’m mentally searching through the library of past projects, identifying modules—again, LEGOs—I’m familiar with, and determining which building blocks we’ll need to build the scaffold this person is asking for.

Facebook has this saying, “Move fast and break things.” I think our office hours should have a tagline like, “Think fast and solve things.” That's the tricky part—somebody comes up with a question, and in my head a couple of concepts start floating around that I need to connect. The hypothesis becomes: Could we solve it this way? Then we try it, hope it works, and refer to another approach if it doesn’t.

How do you communicate the value of your analytics work to stakeholders who aren’t familiar with data?

By focusing on outcomes. Analytics is like a car engine—most people don’t understand how it works, but it’s essential for reaching your destination. I start with what we can achieve: “Wouldn’t you like to understand how long it takes users to complete your signup process? You could set specific KPIs for your product team, like an 80% conversion rate under one minute.”

These possibilities excite people, but I emphasize that we first need to properly set up the analytics foundation. Starting with outcomes helps stakeholders understand why investing time and resources in analytics is worthwhile.

What do you say when people want it faster, or they have unrealistic expectations of what should come out of the work?

I explain that an analytics tracking plan is like a painting. As your product evolves, you add new sections, but you also need to revisit existing elements to maintain consistency—the new green paint you’re using needs to match the green paint you’ve used already.

Do you ever fire customers because they’re not ready?

We challenge them, which sometimes leads to parting ways, but usually we figure it out together. Our objective is always to help clients.

Someone will say “We want this tool,” and ’ll ask why they need it. Often that leads them to realizing what they actually need is education or to solve a different problem first.

Building trust through these honest conversations is essential.

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

We’ve developed what we call “the hive mind”—if one person knows something, everyone should know it. We create reusable resources like articles and videos, and we hold weekly office-hours-style sessions to share solutions to problems so the entire team benefits.

Memory is unreliable, especially for complex technical issues. By documenting solutions internally and sharing them with the team, when I think, “I’m pretty sure I’ve solved this before but don't remember how,” I can check our documentation.

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

We have a sticker at our office that says “Test it.”

That’s my advice—test it.

You don’t need to be a developer—there are plenty of instructional videos. Just click around and try to answer your own questions, even in demo accounts. Then, based on how easy or difficult things are, you’ll know what technical and analytical skills need further development. That’s how you expand your LEGO set.