How Mixpanel uses Session Replay

When we launched Session Replay in Mixpanel, no one was more excited than our own teams because we’d long been juggling separate tools just to watch replays.

Since then, we’ve been using it to visualize user interactions alongside quantitative reports across everything from customer support to engineering. The result: smarter and faster decisions, and in some surprising ways.

Here are some examples of how we use Session Replay all across Mixpanel.

Our teams know and love Mixpanel. Makes sense. So it’s been a big deal that with the rollout of Session Replay, alongside our recent launch of Experimentation, it’s now possible to get the complete picture without having to navigate to a separate tool.

“We can launch an experiment and then both analyze results with reports and watch replays of users across different variants, all within Mixpanel,” said Mixpanel Senior Product Manager Jenna Bono.

Being able to go beyond the numbers gives her team clearer insight into why certain variants perform the way they do, especially when results are different from their initial hypothesis. This gives them more confidence in knowing what works and for scaling out the winning variants.

Even after launch, issues inevitably pop up. We all know this. Session Replay provides context for quickly spotting, diagnosing, and resolving even the sneakiest of them.

Mixpanel Staff Software Engineer Jakub Grzegorzewski explained its utility in error investigation: "Seeing a replay of an error in action is invaluable because I can pinpoint exactly what the user did, whether clicking a button or doing something totally unexpected."

He said it’s Mixpanel’s unique server-side stitching functionality in Session Replay, which ties user behavior to back-end activity, that makes this deep, contextual debugging possible.

Good data governance is key to self-serve analytics. Session Replay plays a vital role for all our teams using Mixpanel by providing visual context.

“Whenever I’m building a report, I can hover over an event and instantly watch the replay of that event in action,” said Nick Lin, a product marketer at Mixpanel. He said that having replays as context removes the need to constantly ping product or data teams for help.

He added: “When everyone can see the same visual context behind the data, we all end up using events and building reports in a more consistent way. It keeps us speaking the same data language.”

When customers report issues, seeing a replay transforms a text description into a visual walkthrough. That’s why our engineering team built a simple hack that automatically adds the associated replays to support tickets

Julianne Bozzini, a Mixpanel Support Engineer, had an issue recently where a customer was getting an error when trying to use Custom Events. “We couldn’t replicate the issue at first. But after I watched a replay of the user’s session, I noticed the bug popped up after they added tags in the Custom Events table,” she explained.

Julianne skipped the usual back-and-forth with the customer and got straight to collaborating with engineering to ship a fix.

Session Replay allows for deep dives into specific user behaviors, making it particularly useful when trying to understand the experiences of smaller, targeted user groups that don’t have vast amounts of quantitative data to crunch. 

One of the most valuable uses for us is with alpha and beta test groups, explained Jenna from the product team: “Session Replay is one of our best ways of measuring a small group of customers to test a new feature's usability or validate an early idea to decide whether to invest resources.”

Mixpanel Senior Product Manager DJ Satoda added that after test launches, he can be found ”watching every single replay of our first adopters to better understand what's going well and what's not.”

Session Replay has been perhaps our most useful tool for investigating truly unexpected user behavior.

Jianing Liu, a Senior Engineering Manager at Mixpanel, said her team has used it to find edge cases that they weren't aware of. “We discovered a really broken flow where a customer was navigating around and somehow didn’t have a project or an organization in Mixpanel,” said Jianing. “In replays, we saw the unexpected default pages being rendered for them and what user flow they took to get to that broken point. Then we started triaging fixes.”

At Mixpanel, we strive for user empathy and believe it’s key to helping us stay close with our customers. Beyond standard user interviews, we’ve found Session Replay helps the most with deepening our empathy by being able to walk in our users’ shoes and better understand their pain points.

Members of our product design team at Mixpanel have a weekly ritual where they randomly sample replays as a group to spot opportunities for improvement through the perspective of the user. “What’s great about this ritual is that it highlights areas of the product that deserve more attention,” said Senior Product Designer Jon Yablonski..

The format is similar to replay “watch parties” of old, but doing it all in Mixpanel means it’s easier to dig deeper into the observed moments using quantitative data in Mixpanel. This puts Jon and his team in position to both better understand the user experience and get right to making it better faster, like they did with a recent tweak to the search field in Session Replay itself.

Whatever the use case, every Mixpanel team now uses Session Replay for the same reason: to make smarter decisions, faster.

By providing deep context alongside quantitative data, Session Replay allows us at Mixpanel to tackle projects ranging from continuously shipping more experiments to improving data governance—with speed and clarity.
Ready to unlock this level of insight for your own team? Learn how to get started with Session Replay in our Docs or by reaching out for a demo.