Alter.Nation
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I’m writing to you today, the Alteryx Community, to say goodbye and thank each and every one of you for being part of my Alteryx story.
The decision to part ways with Alteryx to pursue a new opportunity was hands down the hardest career decision I’ve ever made. I’ve been given endless opportunities to do cool things in community, developed life-long friendships, and most importantly, had a lot of fun along the way. While leaving a job that I love is hard, it’s the right time for me to move on to the next adventure.
I joined the Alteryx Community team in January 2017, just over a year after the new community experience launched. At the time of my arrival, the community had 10K members, who contributed an average of 2K posts each month, and accumulated nearly 3K total solutions.
Even though the community was in its infancy, it already earned a reputation as a gold standard for how to build community and grow a team. I am forever grateful to @dstoecker, @LDuane, along with the founding team, @BrianO, @JulieH, @TaraM, and @JoeM, for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime.
It’s been over 5 years since I started my journey with you – and boy, what a ride it has been! I’m leaving with nothing but positive memories and experiences. As a final hoorah, I invite our members to take a trip down memory lane to reflect and celebrate what we’ve accomplished together.
2017 was a year filled with many new offerings for the community, most of which are still available today:
- We integrated Community search directly within Alteryx Designer – this might not seem like anything major, but I can assure you that any kind of community/product integration is the type of thing community people drool over.
- We introduced the Weekly Challenge, a community ritual that will go down in time as one of the BEST things we did to create a unique community of learning experience.
- We brought Interactive Lessons to the community & rebranded the suite of available training offerings, including weekly challenges and live training, as Alteryx Academy.
- We made our first attempt at localization and brought v1 of a Developer Community experience forward, which has since evolved into what you now know as the Dev Space forum.
- We Kicked-off the monthly Community Highlights blog.
In an early attempt to start a conversation with the community, the one and only Mr.@MarqueeCrew called me out to complete a spatial weekly challenge.
I accepted the proposal and spent all weekend trying to figure it out. For as hard as I worked to earn my first weekly challenge badge, I might as well have made the trek over to Nepal and soloed up to Everest's basecamp in real life.
Later that year, @SeanAdams popped up on my community management radar. Long before his ACE days, he showed up eager to share feedback about everything from our strategy to moderation operations. I developed a friendship with Sean in those early days and quickly learned he’s the type of person you can count on through thick and thin.
My favorite memory of Sean is when he came by the Broomfield office to “say hi” on a road trip across the United States. His one request for the visit, other than meeting the community folks, was to check out @NedHarding’s supercomputer. We figured out how to make it happen – and @TaraM and I were lucky enough to sit in the background and witness magic in the making.
They nerded out for well over an hour, chatting about topics like “medium data.” 🤔
I have many fond memories of attending my very first Inspire conference in Las Vegas. From corralling our top contributors in Ubers to the very first Community VIP Event (cc: @estherb47), the live plinko challenge, the release of the Periodic Table of Alteryx Tools -- what really stood out was seeing the excitement around the Icons of Alteryx Community card game we worked so hard to put together as the token give-away.
I remember meeting @Joe_Mako for the first time when he came to the Community Hub to request autographs. It was a truly magical experience – and something I’ll never forget. ❤️
In 2018, we continued to push the boundaries and expand our definition of community at Alteryx. It was no longer just about the online community – but an entire ecosystem of opportunities for passionate Alteryx users to participate in meaningful ways.
- The Alteryx Certification Program came to life and was integrated directly into the community fold.
- We transitioned the ACE and User Group programs under the community umbrella - While both User Groups & the ACE Program existed long before 2018, both programs were officially integrated within the community ecosystem and department structure.
- We launched the Women of Analytics group.
- We launched the Alter Everything Podcast.
- We brought the Road to Inspire to Community: Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3
The Road to Inspire campaign was quite a memorable experience for me. @DanM and I traveled across the US to interview contest winners and highlight what were truly inspiring stories of life-altering analytics. To this day, it baffles my mind how we managed to get the approvals to literally go have adventures with awesome people from the community. Seriously… we got to go blueberry picking with @andrewdatakim and his family, go play around at the nickelodeon park in Mall of America with @tessaenns, her daughter, and @MarqueeCrew – and yes, Mark was solving community posts on his phone in the line to get on Log Chute ride. We even got to take a trip over to Catalina Island with @ddiesel and her son to go zip-lining. I only got a little sea sick on the boat ride over.
I had SO MUCH fun serving as your community manager in the early days; everything from rapping and attempting to breakdance in the santalytics campaign launch blog, experimenting with VLOGS, baiting @LordNeilLord and @BenMoss to compete for the solution champions title, hacking a video together to celebrate @MarqueeCrew reaching yet another community milestone, and comparing our top contributors to products on Amazon’s best-seller list. I’ll never forget when @danrh changed his avatar to a pressure cooker. It still makes me laugh to this day. 😉
My third year was filled with exciting changes for the community as a whole as well as opportunities for me to develop both personally and professionally.
At that time, the team was growing quickly alongside the community. In addition to bringing on new team members to build out the platform and operations function, I transitioned into a people management position – leading community management efforts and bringing on these talented ladies to help us reach new audiences.
Here are just a handful of programmatic highlights from 2019:
- We overhauled product ideation on community.
- We reinvigorated community content and programming, focusing more on advanced analytics use cases and stories.
- With the support of members across the globe, the community became available in 5 new languages.
- The Academy team continued to innovate, introducing prescriptive learning paths to round out the community learning journey.
- We built an amazing on-site experience for the community at Inspire Nashville.
The opportunity to celebrate long standing top contributors – @CharlieS, @danilang, @patrick_digan, @estherb47, @Thableaus, and @Kenda (not pictured) – in person at Inspire Nashville, was quite the memorable experience for me. I never could get used to calling Daniel anything other than Danilang. #BESTusernameEVER
The early days of the pandemic created new and unanticipated opportunities for our community. While challenging at times, staying focused on experiences that we knew would have a positive impact served us well.
2020 highlights:
- We brought the ADAPT Program to community.
- We built and released the Data Science Portal, consolidating data science and machine learning content and resources into a single feed.
- We made improvements to the community rank structure and email notifications.
- We made our first attempt at creating a fun year-end personalized community campaign #AlteryxSummarized.
The ADAPT Program, which stands for Advancing Data + Analytics Potential Together, was one of those once in lifetime opportunities to build something that had a real impact on people's lives. The cross-functional program was thrown together in record time, with everyone collaborating to provide a service to folks whose jobs were negatively impacted by the pandemic. It was awesome to see that people outside the Alteryx sphere saw the value too – so much so, that it went viral!
In the time since, the program evolved into what you now know as the career changers division of the SparkED program.
Earlier in the year, I brought on another new hire to the team, Mr. @WillM. At the time, the position was based in our Broomfield office. He packed up his life in DC, made the big move to Colorado – and didn’t set foot into the office for well over a year. It was far too long before I got the opportunity to meet him in person, which quite honestly, is my biggest criticism of COVID.
One of my proudest personal accomplishments in 2020 was taking on the challenge of getting Alteryx Core Certified. I could write a whole blog series about my journey to certification. I’ll spare you the long-winded story, and instead direct those who are struggling to a podcast episode I recorded: Alter Everything Episode 63: ADAPT and learn
Shortly after earning my core certification, I shared my accomplishment on Twitter and will never forget the feeling of getting one of the kindest messages from @Ken_Black:
Actually getting the certification was one thing, but words of encouragement from such a reputable Alteryx superstar took the cake. Thank you again Ken – your act of kindness will forever be remembered.
The final years were fulfilling in a completely different way – which I now attribute to becoming comfortable in my own skin. I remember consciously having to shift my focus away from being an Alteryx Community Manager and lean full force into my role as a people leader. I was all in – and going forward, my sole focus was to be the absolute best manager I could be.
Eventually, I was promoted to my current job: overseeing the Community Management + Programs function.
Due to COVID and the changing nature of my job and responsibilities, the positive memories I have of the latter half of my tenure at Alteryx were much more internally focused. The opportunity to grow a team, witness challenges overcome, and see all the community brought forward was more than I ever could have asked for.
2021 + 2022 highlights:
- The team worked with program stakeholders to bring the SparkED program to life on community.
- We launched a new self-service events platform for user groups leaders.
- We brought the Alteryx Gallery to Community.
- We expanded user-driven events + programming.
- We partnered cross-functionally to evolve the ACE Program.
- We advanced automation & personalization efforts across the board.
- We brought in-person Inspire back from the ashes.
In my final month at Alteryx, I was lucky enough to attend my last Inspire. It was great to reconnect with long-time community friends, spend time getting know both newer ACEs and rising community stars (some of whom I was meeting for the first time), and experience what was the FIRST Inspire conference for everyone on my team. Let's just say, you are in good hands. 😎
@JoshKushner, @chriswilliams41, @marcusblackhill, @Aguisande
Today, the community is close to 340K members strong, who contribute an average of 11K posts each month, and have accumulated close to 30K total solutions. Beyond the astounding growth in membership and engagement, we’ve successfully made the case that investing in community is good business.
I am beyond proud to be a part of a community and team who not only stands out as an industry leader, but is leading the charge in our approach to how we measure ROI. With Alteryx on-hand, we’ve proven community has a positive impact on everything from customer satisfaction, adoption and retention rates, self-service cost savings, and even new business and expansion.
The only thing keeping me up at night these days is figuring out how I am going to do my job at a new company without Designer at my fingertips. 😭
Building community takes a village – and I’m so glad that I’ve had the privilege of being a part of the Alteryx Community story. People come and go, and regardless of where we work, where we live, or our personal life choices, our time together building community at Alteryx will keep us connected for years to come. Thank you for everything.
@TreyW, @sachink, @KirkN, @KylieF, @DanM, @mnorberg, @NeilR, @MaddieJ, @MeganBowers, @mikecusic, @AlteryxMatt
@shannonem, @FláviaB, @StephV, @NitashaP, @JessL, @WillM, KarenL, @MattD
My last day with Alteryx is June 10th and after that you can find me on LinkedIn. ❤️
Cheers. On to the next adventure!
