Bill Rappos Director of Product Management“Instincts can navigate my product decisions, but only with product analytics can I get an actual sense of how people use Whisper and how I’m doing when building successful creations. There’s no need to fly blind.”
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Company
Whisper, a media company based in Los Angeles’ “Silicon Beach,” has the largest online platform where people share honest feelings and find connection over shared topics–without identities or profiles.
Goals
For its product and engineering team, Whisper was searching for a way to get the clarity it needed on how people behaved on its platform. With Mixpanel, Whisper had the analytics to empower everyone in their organization with a single source of truth.
“Our goals with Mixpanel were two fold. From an engineering perspective, we needed product analytics that were easily implementable, very well documented, and unconvoluted. That way, we could integrate analytics into any project,” said Bill Rappos, Director of Product Management at Whisper. “Second, we needed an easy way to see exactly how people were using our product, in order for us to make it even better.”
Solution
For its product and engineering team, Whisper was searching for a way to get the clarity it needed on how people behaved on its platform. With Mixpanel, Whisper had the analytics to empower everyone in their organization with a single source of truth.
“Our goals with Mixpanel were two fold. From an engineering perspective, we needed product analytics that were easily implementable, very well documented, and unconvoluted. That way, we could integrate analytics into any project,” said Bill Rappos, Director of Product Management at Whisper. “Second, we needed an easy way to see exactly how people were using our product, in order for us to make it even better.”
Results
Getting insights within seconds
In addition to product and engineering looking to Mixpanel as a single source of truth, Whisper’s customer support and quality assurance teams use Mixpanel in order to troubleshoot specific cases.
“With Mixpanel, we can see into a user’s entire journey. It’s extremely useful to jump back and forth between our own general system and Mixpanel, so both our customer support and QA will get the Mixpanel data, as needed,” said Bill.
From the developer team, quality assurance and data science teams and beyond, Mixpanel provides product analytics that support the operations and initiatives across an entire company.
Iterating to innovate with event-based tracking
For Whisper’s product team, Mixpanel’s event-based tracking played an integral role in improving their product.
“There was this one recent bug that had everyone stumped. We had no idea where to begin in fixing a very crucial flow on Whisper Create.” This product is where users would start building a whisper in order to share their secrets. “We had spent over four years streamlining this product and we saw an average 85% completion rate.”
Suddenly, Bill’s team began to see this completion rate slipping. “In order to find out why the completion rate was dropping and how to fix the problem, we started adding events in every possible way,” Bill explained.
By creating a very specific funnel, the product team discovered exactly where users were dropping off, what was causing the problem was, and quickly began to fix it.
“This bug could have caused a much larger problem for our whole business. If there was a 10% decrease in completing this flow, that would have greatly impacted the quantity and quality of our content and eventually our revenue. We wouldn’t have been able to debug the code without Mixpanel,” said Bill. “Within the product team, and beyond, we saw how everyone could solve problems with data.”
What’s Next
From its content moderation system, to spotting bugs and tracking hundreds of metrics that determine engineering and product priorities, Whisper continues to see product analytics to play a critical role in understanding users and building a media platform that competes with some of the most competitive names on the Internet.