An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brought to you by Pando—Always on employee progression (https://www.pando.com/lenny), Notion—One workspace. Every team (https://www.notion.com/lennyspod), and Lemon.io—A marketplace of vetted software developers (https://lemon.io/lenny).

Vijay Iyengar is Head of Product at Mixpanel, and similar to myself, came from an engineering background before transitioning to product. In today’s episode, he explains how Mixpanel has evolved its growth strategy from a fast-paced, feature-focused approach to a more deliberate approach that prioritizes design and user experience. He also shares how Mixpanel irons out customer problems, including implementing internal tools that allow engineering and product teams to respond to customer feedback directly. Additionally, Vijay shares his top SaaS products, books, frameworks, and more. Tune in to gain valuable insights from a seasoned product leader.

Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/an-inside-look-at-mixpanels-product-journey-vijay-iyengar-head-of-product/#transcript

Where to find Vijay Iyengar:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/vijayiyengar

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijay4/

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

Referenced:

• Mixpanel: https://mixpanel.com/

• Figma: https://www.figma.com/

• Notion: https://www.notion.so/

• “Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters”: https://basecamp.com/shapeup

• The RICE prioritization framework: https://www.productplan.com/glossary/rice-scoring-model/

• BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery

• Census: https://www.getcensus.com/

• Zoom: https://zoom.us/

• FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/

• A Data Stack for PLG teams: https://mixpanel.com/blog/data-analytics-product-led-growth/

• Product analytics in the modern data stack: https://mixpanel.com/blog/mixpanel-partners-with-census-to-bring-product-analytics-to-the-modern-data-stack/

• Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/en/

• Amazon Redshift: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/redshift/

• Event-Based Analytics: https://developer.mixpanel.com/docs/under-the-hood

• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement: https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951

• Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco: https://www.amazon.com/Cool-Gray-City-Love-Francisco/dp/1608199606

• The West Wing Weekly podcast: http://thewestwingweekly.com/

• WeCrashed on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/wecrashed/

• Severance on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/severance/

• Gibson Biddle on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/gibson-biddle-on-his-dhm-product-strategy-framework-gem-roadmap-prioritization-framework-5-netflix-strategy-mini-case-studies-building-a-personal-board-of-directors-and-much-more/

• Shishir Mehrotra on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-rituals-of-great-teams-shishir-mehrotra-coda-youtube-microsoft/

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Vijay’s background

(04:07) How Vijay learned to be more open-minded to new ideas

(06:26) Mixpanel’s journey

(12:40) When to optimize for speed

(13:49) The feature phase vs. the design phase

(17:02) The importance of not losing focus on your core product

(19:52) How Mixpanel organizes teams around buckets of problems

(20:43) Mixpanel’s most recent six-month time horizon planning cycle

(25:08) The RICE framework for prioritization (and when to ignore the C and E)

(26:31) The problem with estimations, and why Basecamp suggests using a six-week time box

(30:04) How Mixpanel keeps product teams and engineers connected to customers via Slack

(33:21) SaaS tools Mixpanel’s teams use

(34:54) The biggest product analytics mistakes

(37:34) The present and future of analytics

(41:05) How adopting a product mindset has helped Vijay grow his career

(41:47) Lightning round

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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Transcript

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0:00.0	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 like we moved people right and so the trap there is that you leave yourself right for disruption in your core because someone else can out invest you in that core.
0:15.0	And so if you're the leader in some core product, our takeaway here is you should continue to out-invest everyone else in that core and then invest, you know, the profits that come out of that core into the next venture.
0:27.0	Invest profits and not people or venture capital, which is maybe like net present value of profit or something to that effect.
0:33.4	But don't take people away from the core to go to these other things because then you end up distracted.
0:40.1	Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products.
0:47.0	Today my guest is Vagee Iengar.
0:49.0	Vagee is currently head of product at MixMantle.
0:52.0	He actually has a very similar career
0:53.6	trajectory to myself where he started as an engine intern at Amazon, then he was an
0:58.1	engineer for a while at Uber. Then he became an engine manager at Mix Panel, but
1:02.0	then he shifted from an engine manager at Mix Panel, but then he shifted from an engine manager to
1:04.4	director of product and now head of product at Mix Panel. They don't often see people
1:08.4	moving from an engine leadership role straight to director of product. So it was
1:12.2	really interesting to hear what he took from his
1:14.0	engine experience and brought into his approach to product leadership.
1:17.0	But we spend the bulk of our time talking about what he's learned
1:20.0	from the journey that Mix Panel has been on,
1:22.0	where they started with a simple product, from the journey that Mix Panel has been on,
1:22.6	where they started with a simple product,
1:24.8	then scaled to a number of different products
1:26.5	solving many problems for customers,
1:28.2	and then made the hard decision to scale back
	...

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