Hi fellow Datamonsters,

This is the second in our series of shining a spotlight on our super users in the community. 

Have you noticed @MikkoKarvonen? There is a good chance you have seen him answering the questions in this forum. We had a chat with Mikko recently, and here is some info about him and how he’s come to be an active user of Amplitude!

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Could you give a brief introduction to yourself to the Amplitude Community? What company do you work for, what do you do there, and what is a fun fact about yourself?
I work for Suunto, a Finnish company building high-end sport watches, dive computers, and compasses for all kinds of outdoors adventures. I’m the principal data analyst, responsible for planning and managing our analytics work, and building the company data culture, while doing as much hands-on work as I can. I’m the most active Amplitude user and analyst in the company.

Fun fact: my first ever job was as an elf at Santa Claus workshop at the Finnish polar circle. So already at my first ever role I was well aware of who was being naughty or nice!

How are you using Amplitude within your current role and for how long have you been using it?
I’ve been using Amplitude since spring 2017, so 4.5 years already.

What Amplitude features do you most heavily use?
Event segmentation (like most users, I expect) and cohorts. I also do a lot of work with portfolio projects, and building dashboards and notebooks.

What features are you interested in that you haven’t yet had a chance to dive into?
I’m looking forward to having time to dig deeper into the whole Recommend package and seeing how it could expand what we are currently doing with Amplitude.

Why did you join the Amplitude Community?
I really like Amplitude as a tool, so a place to discuss and share knowledge sounded immediately interesting.

Can you share with potential community members the most valuable thing you’ve gotten out of the Amplitude Community so far? 
Reading through the different discussions has greatly expanded my understanding of all the different use cases people and organizations have for Amplitude. I have also gotten a number of useful tips from the experiences of others.

Do you have any advice for teams who are just starting to use Amplitude in their Organization?
Before you implement any events, take a moment or few to sit down and think about all the questions you want answered. Then define your data in a way that allows you to answer those questions. One of the most common question types we see is users trying to answer questions with poorly planned data. In those cases, the right solution is almost always to fix the data, instead of engaging some Amplitude acrobatics to get around the situation.

How do you see the Product Analytics ecosystem evolving?
I expect the analytics will more and more shift towards the whole ecosystems on different platforms and services, instead of focusing on individual pieces of it. Another big trend should be automatization: there are a lot of things happening in the data that can / could be picked up automatically.

Anything else you’d like to say to other Amplitude Community members or Amplitude users?
You cannot break anything while using Amplitude and your number of queries is not limited in any way. Take full advantage of this and bravely dive deep into all the tools Amplitude has to offer, dare to experiment! There is a lot of flexibility and opportunities to discoveries in the Amplitude toolset.

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A huge shoutout to Mikko who’s been a core part of the community since Day One!