Amazon QuickSight’s top Community Expert Q1 2024: Meet Erik Göllner

The Amazon QuickSight Community is a one-stop shop where business intelligence (BI) authors and developers from across the globe can ask and answer questions, stay up to date, network, and learn together about Amazon QuickSight. In this post, we are thrilled to recognize Erik Göllner, our top Expert of the QuickSight Community for Q1 2024.

QuickSight Community Experts are a worldwide group of esteemed BI experts who share their incredible expertise in data visualization with the QuickSight Community in order to propel others forward on their BI and generative BI learning journey. Our Experts are the top 10 Community members, ranked by their number of replies to customer questions in the Community and the percent marked by customers as a solution. Experts help others, providing in-depth technical knowledge, best practices, and vetted solutions to QuickSight questions. They welcome QuickSight newcomers and inspire and motivate growing BI enthusiasts. Experts have made a huge impact on the QuickSight Community, leading to exponential, global Community growth!

Meet Erik

Erik Göllner, Manager of Data and Analytics at BYTEpuls, is a seasoned BI professional and a data and analytics enthusiast with over 12 years of experience—spanning roles from developer and project lead to requirements engineer and data and analytics manager. After joining the QuickSight Community in October of 2023 to expand his QuickSight knowledge, Erik learned QuickSight rapidly and then dove headfirst into sharing his expertise, delivering over 1,900 replies and 430 vetted solutions on the Community Q&A forum in under 7 months.

Being active on the QuickSight Community is important to Erik not only personally, but also professionally—raising visibility for his company. Erik learned about the Community through Dirk Hockerts, a Regional Partner Lead for generative artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and BI at Amazon Web Services in Germany. At the time, Erik needed to rapidly implement a QuickSight project at his company. With the Community, he was able to quickly learn about QuickSight—as well as search for answers to his questions and receive help from the Community.

From member to Expert in record time

Inspired to excellence not only by his imminent corporate project but also by personal drive and a competitive spirit, Erik rose through the ranks from being a new Community member to becoming a QuickSight Expert in just 2 months! How did he become an Expert in QuickSight so quickly? Erik explained that what started as a desire to learn and gain visibility for his employer rapidly accelerated, “personal ambition kicked in and [he] wanted to reach the top of the [leaderboard].” Points are awarded on the QuickSight Community leaderboard not only for answering Q&A forum questions, but also for engaging with the Community in a myriad of ways, including visiting, liking, and posting. Erik’s competitive team spirit was informed by over 20 years playing soccer and over 5 years as a trainer for a fitness company.

Erik has remained at the top of the Q&A leaderboard thus far in 2024!

Benefits of being an Expert

As a QuickSight Community Expert, Erik has taken advantage of AWSome opportunities, including speaking at the DACH QuickSight User Group (which serves the three Central European countries of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), sponsored by our partner, Woodmark Consulting AG. In addition, Erik has used his success in the Community to expand his own network and market himself. In his words, “it’s a mixture of knowledge building and marketing.” He also tells us that working with the group of Experts is a lot of fun—our Experts receive swag, visibility, special access, and other benefits.

Growing in the Community

To date, the QuickSight Community features over 400 curated learning resources, including tips for getting started, demos, on-demand videos and articles, events, learning dashboards, and deep dive sections like the Developer Corner to learn about embedded analytics, and the Q Corner for learning about what’s new with generative BI and Amazon Q in QuickSight. Erik has especially enjoyed the videos on embedded analytics. “You can find everything you need for learning [on the Community],” says Erik!

Erik’s early adopter spirit

In November 2023, Erik was the first Community member to use the newly launched QuickSight Arena, an embedded instance of QuickSight, right within the Community, to publish a dashboard to the Gallery as part of our Arena Viz Challenge. With Arena, Community members can use QuickSight for free and showcase their skills by publishing dashboards to the Gallery. They can also incorporate dashboards into Q&A posts to demonstrate their use case, clone analysis views for learning, and share dashboards with solutions when responding to questions. Erik likes the ability to quickly check the Community and answer a question using Arena—straight from his mobile phone. Before he answers questions, Erik uses Arena to clone the underlying analysis and test out his solutions. Erik found Arena’s free sandbox environment especially valuable after transitioning to a new company where he didn’t initially have a QuickSight account.

Erik’s bias for action, along with his rapid journey from being a brand-new QuickSight Community member to one of our top Experts, exemplifies the spirit of learning, collaboration, and knowledge sharing that defines our Community.

Join the QuickSight Community today

Whether you’re a QuickSight enthusiast or just curious about learning more, we recommend checking out the QuickSight Community, where you can find content for any QuickSight persona. Learn how to accelerate your BI learning journey and connect with peers in the Community.

To learn more about how to share your expertise on the QuickSight Community (answering questions, posting articles, or showcasing dashboards), or how to become a QuickSight Expert, contact Kristin Mandia, our Sr. Online Community Manager for QuickSight, at kmandia@amazon.com.

Connect with Erik

Interested in keeping up with Erik’s journey? Connect with him on the QuickSight Community.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Kristin Mandia, our QuickSight Community Manager, for giving all of our Experts a fantastic experience and the recognition they deserve. Many thanks to all of our Experts. And of course, we couldn’t have done this without Erik Göllner, our Top Community Expert for Q1 2024. Congrats, Erik, and thank you for being an integral part of our Community.

About the Author

Julia Bernstein is a Program Manager for Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Web Service’s cloud-centered, fully managed BI service, and the Developer Liaison for the Amazon QuickSight Community.