How Step boosted direct deposits by 14% with Mixpanel’s Experimentation

Step is a financial platform designed to give teens and young adults better tools for managing their money. With a mobile-first experience and a mission to help people build financial independence early, Step focuses on becoming its customers’ primary bank account.

Step set out to make experimentation a core part of its product culture. As the company scaled, it wanted every team to have the confidence that new features and changes were truly driving growth — and the discipline to only ship what worked.

By adopting Mixpanel Experimentation early, Step built a consistent, trusted framework for testing, reviewing, and deciding on product changes. Today, experimentation is part of Step’s DNA, helping them ensure every release moves the needle in the right direction.

Experimentation has always been central to Step’s growth strategy. But before adopting Mixpanel Experimentation, the team struggled with:

• Slow analysis: Step relied on Looker dashboards to track experiments, but the reports were sluggish and not easily available to all stakeholders for quick decision-making  
• Unreliable results: Because Looker lacked built-in statistical significance calculations, there was no way for the team to know if their results were valid enough to trust for decision-making
• Trust gaps: Because experiment analysis was separate from product analytics, metrics couldn’t be reused or tied back to diagnostic reporting. This made alignment harder across teams.

Step needed an experimentation solution that was fast, reliable, and seamlessly integrated with their existing analytics workflows.

As an early beta user for Mixpanel Experimentation, Step quickly saw the value of bringing its experimentation practice into the same platform it already used for product analytics. It replaced slow, fragmented workflows with a fast, trusted system for running and reviewing tests. What used to be spread across Looker dashboards and custom reports is now consolidated into one place where the product team can set up experiments in minutes and trust the results.

Instead of juggling disconnected tools, teams can now review, decide, and record outcomes in one dashboard. They can also do it collaboratively during dedicated experiment meetings.

This is made easily possible in Mixpanel by:

• Building analysis on top of the experiment exposure events, which are sent directly from Step’s in-house feature flagging tool to Mixpanel;  
• Leveraging Mixpanel’s Warehouse Connectors to ensure Step has all its important metrics for experimentation in one place. Mixpanel’s warehouse syncs enable real-time updates to ensure the accuracy of the Warehouse synced metrics; 
• Speedy but trustful building of experiment boards by leveraging Mixpanel’s saved metrics, which enables the reuse of key metrics across experiments, ensuring consistency and clarity.

“Mixpanel Experimentation has become part of our process. During our review meetings, we look at the results, make decisions, and record them directly in the dashboard. The combination of reusing metrics, syncing backend data, and sending experiment events to Mixpanel made it all work for us”, states Giyom Lebleu, Chief Product Officer at Step.

Growth impact: Higher customer adoption

One example: Step improved the conversion rate of customers making it their primary bank account (measured by receiving a recurring direct deposit within the first 30 days) by 14%. A redesigned UX, tested and validated in Mixpanel, guided more customers toward setting up direct deposit — directly supporting one of Step’s most important growth KPIs.

Internal culture: Streamlined experimentation process

Experiment reviews are now structured, efficient, and repeatable. The team meets regularly to evaluate results inside Mixpanel, make decisions on next steps, and record outcomes in the Experimentation dashboard. This has turned experimentation into a disciplined, data-driven practice.

Internal culture: Greater trust and alignment

With Mixpanel dashboards serving as the single source of truth, teams across Step now operate with more confidence. Everyone — from product managers to leadership — trusts the data, which accelerates decision-making and keeps the organization aligned on what’s working.