How PrizePicks scaled with self-serve analytics in Mixpanel

Founded in 2019, PrizePicks simplifies daily fantasy sports for millions of players. Unlike traditional betting, users make lineups by choosing “more or less” on player projections across teams — a streamlined, two-step process: select your players, submit your lineup. This easy-to-play format has fueled PrizePicks’ explosive growth, with a 10.000% deposit increase over two years.

PrizePicks, the largest daily fantasy sports operator in North America, has been on a hypergrowth trajectory. But with rapid growth came an urgent need: empowering every team to make data-driven decisions without waiting on analytics. By implementing Mixpanel, PrizePicks democratized access to product data, identified high-impact problems faster, and improved their most critical conversion funnel, reducing lineup submission errors by 72% in just two months.

As PrizePicks grew, its product team faced a bottleneck:

• All data requests required help from the analytics team, often involving SQL queries.
• Direct access to the database wasn’t scalable or safe as the company expanded.
• Without self-service access, product managers struggled to validate ideas, identify problems, or tell compelling, data-backed stories to leadership.
  

“Previously, every data request from the product team was routed through analytics. We wanted to change that dynamic, not by giving everyone direct database access, but by creating a streamlined system that empowered teams to access insights and make data-driven decisions independently,” says Neil Jagtiani, Group Product Manager at PrizePicks.

To sustain hypergrowth, PrizePicks needed to make product data accessible, reliable, and actionable for everyone — from product managers to marketers to UX researchers.

PrizePicks integrated Mixpanel as its single source of truth for digital analytics. Its data flows into Mixpanel from both the front end and the back end. On the front end, their customer data platform captures user-facing events and passes them directly into Mixpanel, as well as into their data warehouse. On the back end, events are also routed through the CDP and data warehouse before being sent to Mixpanel.

With consistent naming conventions and best practices in place, Mixpanel opened up new capabilities across the organization.

Instead of relying on disconnected tools or backend queries, teams can now:

• Get access to self-serve insights: Product, design, marketing, and CX teams all use Mixpanel to explore data without waiting on analytics.
• Validate and prioritize projects: Dashboards are created for every initiative, giving stakeholders clear KPIs to measure success.
• Identify growth opportunities: Product managers pinpoint funnel friction and propose high-impact growth experiments backed by real-time data.
• Move faster with confidence: Experimentation tools like Split integrate with Mixpanel, ensuring every test is tracked and understood across teams.

“The self-service aspect is the most powerful piece. New PMs and stakeholders now feel empowered to pull the data and tell the story they want to tell — whether it’s a product pitch, a marketing story, or a UX study,” Jagtiani says.

• 72% reduction in lineup submission errors (25% → 7%) in two months
• Faster growth experiments, with dashboards for every new initiative
• Executive buy-in for high-priority fixes powered by Mixpanel insights

1. Faster problem discovery and resolution

Mixpanel helped PrizePicks uncover a 25% error rate in lineup submissions — the most important funnel in the business. By surfacing this insight, the product team gained executive buy-in to prioritize a fix, reducing the error rate to just 7% in under two months (a 72% improvement).

“With Mixpanel, we identified our error rate issues quickly, wrote a pitch, got buy-in, and shipped a solution in under two months,” notes Jagtiani.

2. Empowered teams with self-service data

Mixpanel’s ease of use eliminated the dependency on SQL queries or backend pulls. Product managers, marketers, and UX researchers can now combine qualitative insights with quantitative Mixpanel data to strengthen pitches, validate hypotheses, and tell better stories internally.

3. A scalable growth engine

By embedding Mixpanel dashboards into every project, PrizePicks can measure the impact of initiatives like signup optimization, payments and deposits, and promotion funnels. This structured, repeatable approach ensures that every growth experiment is tracked, analyzed, and tied to bottom-line impact.

“By the end of the year, the goal is for every project to have a Mixpanel dashboard. That way, it’s never a question of where to go to see success — the KPIs are all right there,” Jagtiani says.

PrizePicks just launched an entirely new React Native app — and with it, a renewed focus on consistent event tracking and data reliability. The next phase is about scaling analytics maturity alongside company growth.

“We’re not a small tech company anymore, we’ve got over 500 employees. As we scale, it’s only going to become more important to tell the story not just anecdotally, but quantitatively. We need to show both the business impact and how our users are reacting,” concludes Jagtiani.

With Mixpanel at the center of its analytics strategy, PrizePicks is doubling down on connecting qualitative insights with quantitative impact — ensuring every decision is backed by data and every story told with confidence.