Why collaboration is key for analytics

Google Docs changed the way teams collaborated online. For the first time ever, documents and spreadsheets felt live, open, and engaging.

It marked the beginning of a big trend in SaaS as a whole. Soon, apps like Slack, Notion, and Figma came along to bring the same kind of seamless, digital collaboration functionality to more areas of work. But beyond being fun, this trend was important because when collaboration is a key part of your product, you’re offering an experience that invites people to jump in and explore. And when isn’t it better to have more brains in a project?

This is why we’ve been intentional in designing an analytics platform that becomes more valuable as more people and teams adopt it. If you’re watching the same metrics, sharing findings with one another, and learning together, you can accomplish greater things. Teams become united in a shared purpose, understand what to prioritize next and why, and come together to celebrate wins evidenced by clear, quantitative impacts on their goals.

Here’s a run-through of all the ways we’ve brought more collaboration to Mixpanel and why we think it’s so important for helping teams learn the most they can from their data.

Mixpanel Boards let you organize your various reports and supporting content into a dynamic playground where anyone can jump into the metrics and understand what is being measured and why. The secret sauce is the ability to provide rich context on your Boards with text, photos, and videos. And we show you when your teammates view or edit your Boards or reports so you know your work is getting traction.

Essentially, Boards bring that live and engaging feeling to analytics.

It’s a tradeoff that when collaboration increases and more content is created, companies can suffer from disorganization and increased clutter. With our upcoming nested Boards functionality, we tackle that by letting you create an easy-to-understand hierarchy of Boards that fits your company structure or workflow. Instead of the Blog Engagement Board (or whatever the content team named it) being impossible to find, it can be nested right at the top of the Marketing Board, where everyone in the company would know to look.

While keeping Boards sorted in an orderly fashion is huge, being able to quickly track down any meaningful insights from your team or company with a quick search makes Mixpanel more powerful as teams grow. With Discover, you can explore popular Boards to springboard your own work or pull up analyses created by specific individuals. This also speeds up onboarding and helps stir inspiration.

You can also take Mixpanel with you wherever else you work (e.g., Coda, Figma, Notion) and maintain the real-time data and rich interactivity that makes Mixpanel feel native in your favorite tools.

This dynamic embedding ensures that your analysis, in its full dynamic glory, can even reach members of your team or company who aren’t spending as much time in Mixpanel.

When your team is away from Mixpanel jamming on building your product, creating your next campaign, or problem-solving on something else, we still keep everyone in the loop on metrics wins and losses.

Mixpanel can automatically alert anyone and everyone on your team via an email or Slack channel ping whenever there’s a sudden drop or spike in your metrics. With Root Cause Analysis, teams can quickly take the next step when they receive an alert, whether that’s triaging an issue or uncovering a new opportunity.

If one of the teams in your company used Slack, another couple used Microsoft Teams, and everyone else just had email, your internal comms would be a mess. The same kind of problem happens when a company has various data and analytics tools—and it’s a lot more common a pitfall.

With Mixpanel’s powerful analytics layers for product, marketing, and company revenue data, we’re building a unique platform where almost any team in the company can come in, see the same data, collaborate, and get value. This not only saves time and logistics for organizations that used to have teams separated in places like Tableau and Google Analytics, but it saves them money, too.

Internally, our product team uses Mixpanel, our marketing team uses Mixpanel, our data science team uses Mixpanel, and even our support team uses Mixpanel. We want this level of org-wide analytics collaboration for all of our customers, too!

Even with all of the teamwork functionality we’ve already brought to Mixpanel, we know there’s a lot more potential that exists for collaborative analytics. Bridging that gap is a big part of how we plan to bring analytics to everyone, so you can trust we’re on it.

Here’s to building, together 🛠️