YouSaid · the spoken record

Vijay Iyengar

lines on the record: 51
first: 2023-01-26
most recent: 2023-01-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. I think my handles will be in the show notes. Not super active there, but I definitely check DMs and would love to connect on either of those. And then how can listeners be useful to me? Yeah, I mean, ultimately it makes funnel. We're building a product for product teams. So two things. If you haven't used McFunnel in the last four years, we've changed a lot, as I've described on the pod. So check it out and happy to take any feedback to help us.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gotten a lot of inspiration from Gibson Biddle and his product strategy, medium thing. And in particular, there was a piece on proxy metrics and like the shape of metrics you should use, which I found is the way he frames it is a really elegant way to measure reach and impact at the same time of your metrics. And then also a big fan of Shashir from CODA, specifically his essays on eigen questions, framing problems, and the one on marginal chart contribution is really interesting.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big fan of open-ended questions. And so one of the questions I ask in the behavioral interview at the start is walk me through the story view from college to now or high school to now if they're a more junior candidate. And a couple of interesting things here, like interesting to see where people spend most of their time talking and where they don't. And also how they describe the other people on that journey and do they use like a standard framework to describe everyone or do they go into each person uniquely? tons of follow-up questions from that.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll do a non tech one for this. So I'm a huge fan of the show, The West Wing. And so there's this podcast called The West Wing Weekly that goes into each episode of The West Wing and brings in actors from the show, as well as folks from government to talk about each episode. And it's just a delight to listen to if you love the West Wing.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the business book standpoint, there's this book called The Goal by Elihu Goldrad. And it's kind of an old book, but I like it because it's sort of written in this like fast-paced thriller model. It's like a fiction book, but it's about this idea of the theory of constraints, like finding constraints in a system and how you can remove them to improve productivity. So I found it just like a fun read and also really insightful. Non-technical book that I recommend to folks, particularly those that live in SF, which is cool gray city of love by Gary Camilla, who is a longtime SF resident. And it just goes into the history and the communities and even the geography of San Francisco. And I just discovered so many little pockets in the city from reading that book. So it's something I recommend to people who live in San Francisco.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We open talking about the transition from engineering to product. And I think one of the things that's just been really fruitful in my career both on the engineering side and product side is just adopting that product mindset and getting closer to customers, consuming the raw feed of customer context, taking every opportunity to talk to them. And I'm really excited to see things like this podcast and your newsletter and other forums for engineers to also develop that and get closer to customers because I think Long term, that just means better products and services at lower and lower prices, which is just innovation, right? So I'm really excited to see more of that in the world.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always the new class of startups joining in the analytics space. Never a dull Yeah, I think this is something that we're looking to solve because analytics is only as good as the data. And if people are already collecting gray data in the warehouse, I mean, we integrate with the warehouse really well, then we get access to that good data. Increasingly, what we've been seeing is that companies like in the reverse ETL space, like Census and Hightouch, are effectively reinventing the CDP, reinventing data movement tool like segment on top of the data warehouse. And so really our strategy there is just tightening our integration with those tools. And we've seen just huge growth and people using their data warehouse as the source for events, like not adding SDK tracking anywhere and just saying, I already have events sitting here. I trust all of them. They're from all parts of my business. Why can't I do analytics on my sport tickets and my gong calls just as easily as I can do it by my user behavior? And so I think that's something we're seeing and we're investing in.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sequences of events and segmentations of events. And so one of the things that we're spending a lot of time thinking about is how do we get that really rich, trusted comprehensive data set from the data warehouse into a tool that's optimized from the UI down to the data model for events because that unlocks really fast intuitive exploration of data on data set that people already have in trust. So that's, I think, one of the big trends we're excited about and what we see as the future.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second thing in terms of where things are going is That events, like a time series of users did this action at this time are the universal data model for analytics. And the reason for that is every action, every interaction a customer has, whether it's with your sales team, like a gong call or with your marketing team, like they clicked on that or viewed a marketing article or their product, which is more well known. Those are all events. They can all be modeled as events. And it's super granular, super intuitive as a way to understand what people are doing. And it's really powerful because oftentimes you want to ask questions about sequences of events, right? Like which user spent this much time on my pricing page and then looked at three developer dots. That's probably a user I want to reach out to. Or, you know, so many things can be modeled off of that. And so I think data warehouse is becoming the loading dock for all this data, which can be very easily modeled as events, but it's not a very great analytical tool for events because SQL is optimized for rows and tables and joins and not events.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think one huge trend is the rise of the data warehouse. So these are Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift. And they're really scalable and they speak the SQL standard, which has led to this explosion of tools that have emerged around them and make it really easy and cheap to load data into the data warehouse and then also easy to push data out of the data warehouse by tools like Hansets to do that. This has a few implications. So the first is that the data warehouse becomes the center of gravity for all data in your company, whether it's product, marketing, and sales data. They all land there. And I think that's really valuable today in this product-led growth world and a lot of incentives filled with bad. But from a data standpoint, that means all these teams need to be operating off of the same version of the truth. And that version of the truth is sitting in the warehouse and it just needs to be joined correctly.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That engineers have been tracking events from servers forever. It's called logs, right? And events are just logs where they user ID in them. And so they don't need to deal with learning in USDK and dealing with all of that. They just have to track logs that have some structure and a user ID in them. They're tracking events. And so if it's easier for the developer, it'll get done in a higher quality way. So I think the really simple advice there is just start tracking events from your servers instead of from your clients. And if you need to supplement it later on with context that's only on the client, you can add that on later. But server-side should be the default.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same thing, but are just different because of the two platforms, and you might have two teams owning that. And the second issue, which is I think even worse, is that you are kind of beholden to clients updating their mobile app to get the latest version that has your latest tracking. So if you want to add new tracking, it'll only apply to people at the latest version and beyond. Whereas yet, all of your old tracking, whether it's broken or you made a mistake, is still out there in the wild. And so you're constantly getting events that are old and broken. And so what we recommend instead, and that we've seen a lot more customers adopt recently, is just track events from your servers instead of your clients. And that has three benefits. One, it's instantly cross-platform, web and mobile and TV and whatever other platform. They're all going to go through your servers. So you instantly get 100% reach. The second is it's in an environment you control. So if you want to update tracking, you can update it and updates for 100% of your users. And then the third thing is that, and this is, I think, maybe unintuitive, but it's true.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many people still do this, but I think the biggest mistake is setting up analytics using client-side SDKs, client-side tracking. So like web and mobile SDKs, like putting a mixpanel.track or a segment.track in your web app or your mobile apps. And the reason the hot take is that for many people that's product analytics and SDK tracking are synonymous. They're like, all right, McFanel means SDK. I have to put an SDK in my web and mobile app. But that's a mistake because we've just seen time and time again, it leads to poor data quality and difficulty to maintain that data. So the problem on web is just due to ad blockers and other unreliable things in the JavaScript world, you end up dropping 20 to 30 percent of your events. And so it just doesn't match your internal databases. And then on mobile, there's two problems. The first is that you have to reinvent tracking for both iOS and Android because it's two different languages and two different platforms. Generally speaking, and so you end up with many duplicate events that semantically mean.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a couple blog posts that talks about our stack for sort of like we use this both for kind of our PLG infrastructure and like our product lit sales, like defining a PQL and alerting a new user fits that criteria. But then we also use it for internal tools. We have a few blog posts on that topic.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our stock is actually fairly standard these days. So we have Slack, Zoom for communication, Notion for Docs Any long form writing, and it's a wiki and database and fig modic gem for design and whiteboarding. I think what's actually more interesting is our data stack and the productivity we get out of that. I briefly touched on this where basically all our data gets EPL'd out of all the systems we have, Lands and BigQuery, gets joined and modeled, and then pushed out via census to all the other tools in our stack. And I think that's been a huge productivity in lock because you can build internal tools of very little code. If you can write SQL, you can build an internal tool, basically, and that pushes information to the teams that need it. And so that, I think, just has unlocked a lot of these types of things like automating qualitative signals with no code in a reliable way. And then if someone was like, oh, can I get ARR on this? Yeah, sure. It takes two seconds to do that. So I think that data stack has been a huge productivity on Mod for us.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The trap, of course, is what you just called out. It's like you can't be reacting to everything all the time. And certainly, if you ship a redesign, right, like the first two weeks of that, there's going to be a bunch of feedback. But like, I hate this, go back. And I think that's sort of an organizational muscle. You have to build balance the reaction. And that's just a thing we've had to practice doing. But I think the trade-offs are worth it.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One nice thing about the stack actually, the data stack is that basically all these feeds information land in our data warehouse, which is BigQuery. And from there, they're pushed out via a reverse CTL tool we use called Census to Slack and Notion, if that makes it no code. One of the benefits of that is that we can enrich all of these feeds with who's the account, what's their ARR, who's the CSM, and all that other contact information. So it's usually not like an engineer's blindly reaching out to a customer customer without letting a CSM know if it's like a million dollar account or something. The idea is just like trust them with that context and they can tag the right people and make the right call.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To that channel and react with the message with an email emoji, which means I'm going to email this customer and find out more. And those email the customer and say, hey, I'm the engineer that built this feature. I saw you said this specific thing. Can you tell me more? I'd love to understand. They ask the five whys and then they improve the product on their own. And I think that culture is just so important. And it just empowers all engineers and designers to think like a PM a little bit, which I think takes a little bit of the load off on the PM to be the gatekeeper of all that information. And then over time, we've evolved it quite a bit as our data stack is involved. So we now not just take customer requests, but we take things that are posted on Twitter and NPS survey feedback and win loss notes from our competitive deals and pipe them both into Slack and into Notion so that we can both get the real-time feed and then we can sort and aggregate and tag things accordingly. But the key artifact of this is that it's all open. There's no gatekeeper behind that process.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is one thing that is something we invested in pretty early on at Makes Battle. Actually, around that time in 2018, when we repocused on our core product, one of our sales engineers, Aaron, built this automation where he piped all these customer gaps that we got that were reported by our customer success and sales teams, piped that into Slack in just a feed. And what this created was this culture where all engineers and designers could consume that raw feed of direct points of customer with no gatekeeper, no process to access it, no pre-aggregation, right? And I think this scales pretty far. Like at a product team of our scale and with our reach of customers, we don't get so much feedback that someone couldn't read it in 20 minutes every day. And for like four or five years in engineering, every day I would read all the gaps that we got. And many engineers would do that. And one of the rituals that has enabled is we'll find that engineers will go”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the shape up process if you run it all the way they do their idea is that you can actually predict on a six feet time horizon so you you can just hammer down scope to something that is complete it needs to be complete it can't be milestone one that's like a half baked thing in six weeks which i think that rigor like the rigor they applied to that across the board you need to do it all the way you can't adopt the process halfway i think is the is the challenge otherwise you end up with people shipping like milestone one and then moving on which is not the complete product”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good thought exercise and it just forces everyone to truly score the requirements critical nice to have is nice, but really if in two weeks you're going to get pulled off to do something completely different, what would be a complete solution that addresses the core problem? And it forces you to pill like the meat of the problem in first as opposed to just doing the things that are surrounding it.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We operated that way in engineering, like literally on the infrastructure side, because we had this series of projects that would just take forever. And the longer it takes, the longer it's going to take. And so we've done that exercise quite a bit. I'd say more on the more engineering heavy projects than others. But we're starting to adopt it more in the product side as well. The main exercise we've taken on the product side is more the considerable, what would you do differently with different time boxes approach?”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Six weeks for everything. And they're really austere about if you can't scope hammer something down to six weeks, you're doing it wrong, which I think is, it can work and has a lot of benefits if you creates a rhythm in your company. But one approach I found that works better is you pick a reasonable sounding appetite and just explore the two to three options around it. Pick six weeks and then say, what would we do differently if we only had four weeks or eight weeks? And you'll kind of naturally find the efficient frontier of cost and impact and then align on that. And the important thing is that you check in after that time period and say, is there any new information that suggests we should continue? Did we uncover the biggest risks and are we just on the long tail of things? And actually be honest with yourself about that. I think that's important regardless of what framework you use.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not super opinionated on the exact tools that teams use. I think this is like a team local exercise typically, but most teams use Notion and just simple tables or databases in Notion or this. I think the other thing on partization that's always tricky is estimation. And every engineer will value estimates are all lies. And if you say it'll take eight weeks, it'll take eight months. But one, I think the core problem with estimation is you're asked to estimate things before you know what the thing is. And it's a strange output to be expected to produce. And one approach that I found really interesting is from this book called Shape Up by Basecamp, which is this idea of appetite over estimates, where instead of making the estimate an output of planning, you make the time box or an appetite, the input, and you say, we want to solve X problem and we're willing to invest six weeks. It's not like that problem. Obvious question there is like, you know, how do you pick that time window? It just seems arbitrary. And so the Basecamp people suggest just pick.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That set of ideas, you can get pretty far in understanding the confidence and the effort. You can probably find a higher confidence, lower effort way to do them. Then add the CNE back in and then rice as usual. And the goal is to end up with a reasonable mix of innovative bets, incremental bets, and then ones that are technical bet or product debt that you need to address.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One really common framework in partition is rice reach impact confidence effort. And I think it's simple and fairly robust, which is, I think, generally good qualities of a framework. But one of the traps with rice that we observed is that the C and E, the confidence and effort, tend to cause you to prematurely deprioritize potentially high-reach high impact bets, really innovative things. And we encountered this on one of our teams early last year where we just riced everything, all the ideas. And a lot of the high reach high impact things ended up at the bottom because confidence and effort were just so murky for them as they should be typically for high reach, high impact ideas. And so one exercise that we push our teams on is just ignore the C&E for a little longer than is comfortable and just sit with those high reach, high impact ideas with engineers and designers in the room committed to actually trying to solve them, like give it a fair shot. And you'll often find like if you spend a week on”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's basically three artifacts that are kind of linked to each other. So the first is we use Notion. And so we have a database in Notion called Bets, which is where each page in the database is a bet. And that has a template. Yeah. So it's kind of roughly what I described with a few more sections of what problem are we solving? What's the evidence of demand? What's the region impact of this problem? How do we know we're successful? And then what's the key driving hypothesis behind the solution? And then a rough plan. And then that's tied with the presentation that's kind of like a tight summary of that that has like one slide per bet and then is also tied with more of an execution focused how do we sequence and staff this thing and eliminate dependencies which the engineering team contributes to so i think those are the three artifacts that are linked together”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The teams did pre work for a couple of weeks, like two weeks in December, and then we did a two week sort of sprint on solutioning and ideation in January, like the first two weeks.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We aren't a huge product team, and we're not going to do like 50 things in a half. We're going to do maybe 10 to 12 things. And so that's enough that we can do something that doesn't scale if that enables high bandwidth communication between us and the teams. And it ends up being more messy and unstructured, I bet, in that phase because we're just in there contributing ideas as well. But by the end of it, I think the team leaves feeling both more confident in their bets because there's more thought that's gone into it and then more aligned top to bottom line why we made certain decisions. And so I think that that's one thing that's different. And then we conclude that process with a roadshow where we present to the rest of the company and get their feedback as well.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were myself in our head of design actually spend time with each of the teams actually ideating on the vets and participating in the solution discovery process, going into the jam sessions and adding figmustic keys ourselves with ideas and thoughts on things, which we did because”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, basically it started out with this strategy memo that our leadership team wrote that basically just conveys this is where we want to go as a company in the next year. And here's how the product team can contribute most of that. I just establish these key pillars. We shared that with the teams. And they took that and also combined that with all the quantitative and qualitative context they're constantly consuming about the problem they're working on and our customers and ideated and developed a series of bets for the next six months, which I think are to some extent similar to OKRs, where a bet, the anatomy of a bet is that it's probably we want to solve our hypothesis on the solution and then some plan to win, like some plan to actually get there and a way to measure that you got there. And I think one of the unique things that we did relative to other companies that do planning is I think it usually is sort of this W process of there's the strategy memo and then teams generated bets and there's a review and then they go back and I iterate and then they finalize and we kind of collapsed the middle part of the W.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way it works is that we plan on a six month time horizon. And I can talk about our most recent planning cycle, actually, because we're just completing it.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have these kind of unsolved problems in analytics that we're going after. For us, that's like people always want more power, more simplicity, better data trust, faster onboarding, better collaboration, better price performance. And so we largely organize our teams around those problems and those missions. One quick aside there is that some of those problems have a tension with each other, like power and simplicity. There's a trade-off there, right? And we want one team to own both so that they can, they're kind of forced to confront that tension and beat that trade-off. And so that's kind of how we think about generally our product team is these cross-functional EPD teams, each of which that's focused on solving these long-lived paired problems. First are like our core analysis team focused on that power simplicity trade-off problem. In terms of planning,”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Painful, and there's teams that have whole roadmaps. It's a really painful experience. So you have to think really hard before you kick those off.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those secondary products we took on were in categories of their own. And it's really tempting, and you'll often get dragged into building accidentally entering another category. And then you'll end up building these bolt-on products that are the nth best in their category. And like the adjacent categories for analytics or like CDPs or message targeting or feature flagging or something. But there's not that many people that need the sixth best CDP or the eighth best feature flagging or the 10th best message targeting tool. And it ends up being in aggregate will contribute 5 to 10% to your revenue will seriously accelerate your growth rate and then takes engineers away from the core product. And so those were the circumstances that we were in. And I think if you're seeing turn to your competitor around your core product and you're not best in class on any of the other ones, then maybe it's time to reevaluate. And then the last thing I'll say there is that it's also 10x more painful than you think to cut mild successes than anything else. And organizationally.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if there's a hard and fast rule here. I can just maybe say what made sense and didn't make sense in our context. The issue for us at the time was that we took people away from the investment in our core product to go do those other things. We moved people, right? And so the trap there is that you leave yourself right for disruption in your core because someone else can outinvest you in that core. And so if you're the leader in some core product, our takeaway here is you should continue to outinvest everyone else in that core and then invest the profits that come out of that core into the next venture like invest profits and not people or venture capital, which is maybe like net present value of profits or something to that effect. But don't take people away from the core to go to these other things because then you end up distracted. And the other aspect of that is that”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go do that, just like separating them for a bit from the tactical fire. Because what was happening instead was we would get towards the end of the project, bring design in, and they would use each project as an opportunity to squeeze in like, oh, and we can simplify here. And that's just a classic way to blow up scope at the end of the project because there wasn't a dedicated space for design-led projects. And I think that was kind of a key friction point that we ultimately had to decouple for a bit and then regroup and say, okay, now we're like with our strategy. and just take on projects purely for the sake of improving consistency, reach, depth of our UX.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was definitely more messy internally than I described it. One of the key junctures was when we had this really talented design team and we were putting them on these very tactical projects that was like, frankly, that was very engineering led, right? And design would often come in at the end and be asked, like, hey, can you just make this look nice and put some pixels on it? And it's just such a waste of your design team to have them do that. But at the same time, the pace was so high that they didn't have time to come up for Aaron and do anything else. And so there's actually this moment where I was an engineering manager part of this and had a meeting with our BM and our head of design at the time. And we said, hey, we can actually do the next three months of projects without any design, which was a kind of controversial thing to say, but we're doing this so that you can take three months with a set of designers and go think about the system architecture of the product. And we'll be, you know, we'll wait for that to be done before we do any architectural things that might impact the architecture. And I think that gave designers like a bit of breathing.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think out of the first track. Oh man, there's so many that were just core. Like, we didn't have a good cohort product at the time, like just being able to create behavioral cohorts of users and create them from any report that we built. And I think that it's just table sticks and analytics to be able to do that. So that was one of the first things we built. And it was fairly obvious. There's a lot of other things and more advanced types of funnel analytics and flows and visualization that was really interactive. I think on the design-led phase, The biggest thing I think was visualization consistency and making our charts interactive in a consistent way across all across our entire product. And so there's two things that enabled. One was that every time you added a new visualization or a new enhancement to a visualization or like how something is sorted in one report, it just instantly applied everywhere. So just the reach was multiplied for everything we added. And the other thing is it just made the product more accessible, let us add dark mode. It made our visualizations really stunning and really easy to see.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was the right call to just sort of like the on-call thing again where when you're in trouble, you got to get out of trouble. You can't mow your lawn while your house is on fire. You've got to put out the fire and then deal with everything else. So that's kind of the approach we took.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It highly depends on your context. In a very competitive context where there are just table stakes features that customers need and that it's been validated by the market, you need to optimize for speed more so than anything else. But it is an approach that outlives its usefulness pretty fast. And we put that approach behind us relatively quickly after that phase. And I would actually say that design driven phase was the next phase where it was, okay, we're not bleeding on the table stakes anymore, but we want to make a holistic product that has high reach, high impact on the features and is actually usable. And so that was, I think, like a follow-on phase that's necessary. Obviously, depending on your particular circumstances and competitive dynamics, you can sequence them differently.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing I might have made it seem like it was just the buckets were features. We did take the step of turning them into problems and being clear, like exposing engineers directly to the customers that had those problems and then invent a solution to solve them. So, I mean, loosely there were features involved, but a lot of them were kind of core problems. We needed to solve.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Born out of the fact that so many great products win or lose based on their architecture. I think Notion, for example, that pages and blocks architecture is so strong and you can hang so many features off of those core building blocks in a way that has such high impact on reach and discovery of those features. So anyway, we did that in parallel with and continued that grind on CoreJApps. And so the end result of that phase, which is from 2018 to maybe late 2021, 2022, was our retention went from about 60% to 90% and our NPS went from 16 to 50. So I think, yeah, I mean, there's a lot in there to unpack, but repocusing on the core really helped us achieve those results.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is 2018 to 2019. Got it? Yeah, so we moved really fast shipping all these features and instantly saw the improvements to win rate and to retention But one of the cracks that started to emerge was we neglected the holistic design of our product design. And if you're shipping features that quickly, you don't have time to stop and think, like, where does this go and how does this fit into our overall system architecture? And what started to happen was that we were hitting diminishing returns with some of these features and like not considering the holistic design and consistency meant the reach of every feature was low. You had to rebuild it for every part of the product that we were in. And so at the time we made, we spent up the second stream that was very design led. And I think this is also coincided around the time we adopted Figma. And it's a really broad design at seat at the table of the company. And we just set up this goal to make design one of our key differentiators. So this design driven initiative was really about how can we think about the system architecture of our product? What are the key building blocks of McFanel? Where do they need to fit? How few of them can we have, which is a really important step, and then how will users discover them and how do they relate to each other?”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Standpoint, how we operationalize this was we threw away all our planning and all the execution and the work that we planned to do so far. And we did something very simple. We took all the churn reasons that our customer success and sales teams had been painstakingly collecting for years, grouped them by category, which was like roughly product features we needed to build, sorted descending by ARR, took the top 10 things, and made that our roadmap. I just gave every engineer direct access to customers and give them a bucket to go work on, which I think goes against about a million product best practices out there of just doing that. But I think given the context at the time, we need to optimize for speed. And speed comes when you have extreme clarity on what you want to do and focus. And so we really just optimize for speed in that time. And so in that first year, we moved really quickly and we shipped something like 100 features in that year and closed a lot of gaps. Again, these are all vanity metrics, like measuring number of features.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other aspects that we fed into was data infrastructure and trying to be sort of the single source of truth of data in companies. And what I ended up happening was that by 2018, we had this big churn problem. We had something like 40% churn, revenue churn, our core product. And when we dug into it, it wasn't that people were churning because they didn't need product analytics anymore. They had the need. They were just churning to competition because we were just not up to the market in terms of the features we had in our core. And when we dug into why that was, it was just that we had a 50% engineering team that was building products across three domains, right? Product analytics, messaging, and some data infrastructure stuff. Our engineering team was just spread too thin to address all of those core gaps in functionality. And so we made a really hard call at the time. We said the hard no to those two other categories and decided to focus our entire engineering team on closing the gap on product analytics and innovating there. And from a process,”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“McDonnell started in 2009 as provide frolic analytics to EPD teams. And I think early on it saw a lot of success because it built this in-house database called ARB, which stands for Arbitrary Segmentation. And that was necessary because events data, which is the fuel for product analytics, is few orders of magnitude larger than most other types of data that people collect. So you need a specialized approach to deal with it. And so that, I think, spurred the first wave of explosive growth because product analytics was a really burning problem at the time. People were shipping mobile apps like crazy, and they needed a solution that could scale. And that was kind of a durable mode for MakeFunnel for a while. And I think because we had this SDK that was installed on so many apps and we had this really scalable event collection and analytic interface, it was just not.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some of the best engineers that I've worked with actually already do this. But Folder, they're able to balance both in their head. So ultimately it's this balancing act of you just want on call. You are woken up three times at 3 a.m. due to various bad ideas. And the next morning you wake up and then stand up. It's like, hey, can we do this new thing? You kind of have to have that empathy and do that. So yeah, I think the exercise is just like just take 10 minutes to consider the idea. Just sincerely consider how might we make it work. And if at the end of those 10 minutes, it's like futile and there's no path, it's fine to say no. It's a good instinct to say no. Actually, in a lot of cases. But yeah, I would recommend that to engineers. I think it would have been better in my career for sure if I had learned that sooner.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make yes, we're going to do that earnestly, not as an exercise of just an alternative that you're considering. Try to do it sincerely and get to know after trying to make yes work. And so that's one thing I've been trying to just apply my engineer problem solving brain to do that instead of thinking about how it might not work and saying no.”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things, if you've been in engineering for a while, is that develop this tendency to immediately respond with no to new ideas. And I think from the engineering perspective, this is because you spend a lot of your time building and maintaining ideas that maybe are half thought out or didn't really go anywhere. And you just feel like the full brunt of the maintenance cost of that. And so you build up this scar tissue and this immune response, the same node and new ideas. And it's a hard no. Like, no, we're definitely not going to do it. And I think I had to unlearn that moving into product because you get a lot of ideas coming from a lot more places in the organization. And ideas are fragile in their infancy. And it's a hard no can really kill a whole direction that you could potentially go. They could be very high reach and high impact. So one thing that I found is the best way to get to a no, if you ultimately need to get there, is to try to make it work. Like try to make yes work and document how you've”
2023-01-26 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source