Self-serve product analytics empowering teams

Almost every company strives to be data-informed, which can lead to a tendency to collect product data in droves. But, too often, only a select few are given the ability to actually distill product data into real insights. What’s with this data gatekeeping?

For starters, data isn’t always easily accessible to those who need it. Engineers, product leads, growth marketers, and executives all need data to do their work, but are often limited due to the complexities of data storage and querying systems. This forces them to rely on a centralized data team of analysts or data scientists for answers, putting additional burdens on their team.

To overcome these challenges, teams need self-service product analytics, which allows all stakeholders to access and easily understand the data they need—reducing bottlenecks and empowering everyone to measure what’s important to them and report progress in a scalable way.

We sat down with several Mixpanel customers including ZipRecruiter, Ancestry, Go Daddy, and more to get their perspective on how self-serve product analysis helps their businesses.

Analyzing products without a purpose-built tool

In our work with innovative companies, we’ve found that there are some common challenges businesses experience when trying to implement a product analytics strategy.

Common challenges companies across industries face include:

• Only data scientists are expected to dig deep into the data to answer important product questions
• Running reports requires SQL knowledge
• Once data requests are submitted, it can take a long time for analysts to get back to teams with answers (due to high demand placed on them)
• Even with highly trained data experts who know SQL well, there is room for error

Our self-service product analytics tool helps clients overcome these challenges by:

• Offering powerful analytics for all
• Giving people at all technical levels the ability run reports and access the results independently
• Enabling teams to answer everyday product questions on their own
• Serving as a single source of reliable product data

With data at everyone’s fingertips, teams can experiment and iterate more quickly.

Powerful product analytics for all leads to faster results

Successfully running an app—especially at the global level—requires a significant amount of data, and it can be a challenge for teams to analyze data without the help of a product analytics tool.

ZipRecruiter, for example, has many product managers and engineers monitoring different aspects of their applications, while trying to find room for improvement. The company keeps track of hundreds of metrics across departments and regions.

Though they have internal tools, these systems don’t support interactive, real-time slicing and dicing of data and the exploration of hypotheses, so teams spent hours running SQL queries to understand customer behavior.

When ZipRecruiter implemented Mixpanel, the process became more streamlined.

“Without Mixpanel, I’d be pretty bogged down and frustrated. I’d be spending a lot more time writing and processing SQL queries. I’m able to move as quickly as I do because of Mixpanel. Mixpanel makes analytics fun. I spend less time trying to figure out how to get the right data, and more time looking at it.”

Akio Bandle

Product LEad, ZipRecruiter

With product, go-to-market, and other teams armed with the data they need, they can get their jobs done more quickly without being held up by the long list of items analysts have to address. With real-time data and funnels, all teams can access a reliable picture of the customer journey and engagement rates, leading to better and more timely decision-making.

Dan Rader, Senior Product Manager at GoDaddy uses Mixpanel for deep funnel analysis across the customer lifecycle to intimately understand their activity.

“We use Mixpanel for the first part of the funnel, for discovery, activation, and engagement. I’m in Mixpanel every day, multiple times a day looking at the micro funnels and looking at the inner engagement of customers.”

Dan Rader

Senior Product Manager, godaddy

Team connectivity improves products end-to-end

Alignment is not just for sales and marketing. Developing and selling a successful product requires many different roles (data engineers, data analysts, software engineers, project managers, marketers, sales, etc.) to collaborate and communicate from ideation to delivery and customer success. Having a central location for data and analysis for product, engineering, and marketing teams allows stakeholders to work together more easily.

“For me, the connectivity Mixpanel provides is super valuable. Every user sees their unique KPIs and custom dashboards. I can have a set of KPIs for my role and everyone has different ones for theirs. The engineering and product teams within our Middle Americas region have access to Mixpanel.”

Sergio Sotomayor

Customer Experience Manager, Anheuser-Busch In-Bev.

Data stored in one place across teams makes it easier for teams to justify new ideas, determine where they should spend their time, and rely on the same source of truth. With more than 50 integrations, teams using Mixpanel can send data to and from many other vendors. This allows various stakeholders to get their jobs done while sharing the same data with other teams.

Dashboards and reports offer greater visibility into the customer experience

No matter their level of maturity or data literacy, users can easily harness Mixpanel to create trustworthy reports that are easy to understand.

“It’s very easy to create reports on the fly, unlike other UI tools.”

Sanjiv Mishra

Manager, Product Analytics, Ancestry

The product managers at Ancestry needed a way to answer tough questions about customer retention and behavior across multiple devices. Instead of needing to go to analysts for answers, product managers could derive crucial answers independently and quickly. This allows teams to make better decisions on the metrics they want to see move.

Similarly, Tom Markworth, Senior Director of Product Management, RingCentral said, “our product, go-to-market, and engineering teams all use Mixpanel. It’s not just a tool for our data analytics team. Regardless of technical ability, anyone can gather insights from Mixpanel.”

With the easy-to-use reporting features, the RingCentral team is able to answer questions like:

• How did we do when we launched this feature?
• Are there things that users aren’t using that we want to hide or remove from the product completely?

By diving into specific questions, and using the data displayed in the clear dashboards and reports, the team at RingCentral makes more confident decisions.

“Mixpanel is actually influencing what features we put into the product and where we put them. We’re iterating at a really rapid rate and easily consumable data helps us do that.”

Tom Markworth

Senior Director of Product Management, RingCentral

The democratization of data drives innovation

Innovation relies on systematic, and quick, decision-making. In order to overcome bottlenecks in the analysis process, teams across multiple departments need to be able to access data without the help of a data engineer.

“Mixpanel has helped us tremendously,” said Ajit Kahaduwe, SVP Carrier Strategy and Product Management Platform & Services, PGi.

“Asking developers to pull data isn’t an efficient use of their time. Furthermore, getting back the data can often lead to more questions—and more data requests. Pulling an initial set of data could take 1-2 days, but iterations involving further questions would take even longer. That’s where the power of Mixpanel comes in—you can dig through data in seconds and pivot as needed. In the past, that wouldn’t have been feasible.”

Ajit Kahaduwe

SVP Carrier Strategy and Product Management Platform & Services, PGi

With connectivity, integrations, and powerful dashboard capabilities, self-serve product analytics allows teams of all sizes and technical capabilities to run analysis and discover what changes move the needle. Teams across departments can access reliable results and make informed decisions that will improve customer experiences. At the same time, data analysts are freed up to engage in more strategic assessments.

Mixpanel is the most powerful self-serve product analytics that helps you convert, engage, and retain more users. Democratize your data with a demo or start running a query on your own with sample data.