Simplifying discovery

Outcome: Created a 1.53M+ lift in ARR by eliminating context switching in core product

Mixpanel is a product analytics tool that customers use to understand user behavior and analyze product performance to inform business decisions. I joined Mixpanel to continue making delightful data tools that empower teams with data superpowers. In the core experiences team, I researched, concepted and designed new ways for Consumers (nontechnical audiences) to engage with their data intuitively.

Team

Services

Date

ROLE

Audience & Problem

Mixpanel’s data tools became tough terrain for non-technical users (Consumers) —like PMs, execs and designers. They’d spot something interesting on a report, but hit a wall when trying to dig deeper. Insight and user profiles lived in separate worlds, making it harder to design smarter campaigns or run informed A/B tests.

At the time of this project Consumers made up 76% of audience using our core product. To ensure exisiting companies continue expanding seats for their teams, it was critical to fix this problem. And to also support a successful monetization strategy (companies test with their teams Mixpanel before moving to a paid plan).

Problem

Reduce context switching and keep exploration close to the moment of curiosity
Fuel confidence to help a non-technical audience trust their findings and act decisively

Goals

Drive adoption and retention through better usability to improve ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)
Solution must be scalable, contextual and systemic to be used across the suite of reports
Metrics to keep an eye on: interactions per session (time to value, frequency of segmentation), 7-Day Rentention and NPS

Approach

Unlike data scientists, Consumers want a smooth, no-query, no-maze data dive. I tested everything from Slack-delivered reports to surfacing org-wide questions—but landed on interactive charts. Why? Teams already had rich reports there, ready to power smarter, self-serve exploration.

Working in Tandem with Design Systems

Mid-project, our design systems team was shaking things up with a major product redesign. I teamed up with them to introduce a flexible side panel and modular chart components built to scale across the product.

To top it off, our brand designer brought the magic with playful avatars that gave profiles personality and sparked user curiosity.

Simple Fast Analytics

In Insights Consumers grasp user engagement in seconds—no SQL, no waiting, no fuss. ✨ Bonus: the scalability aspect of the solution afforded the development team to scaled it fast and shipped it across the product in record time.

I designed a universal action menu that lets users jump from insight to details—anywhere in Mixpanel, across all reports. One menu, endless momentum.

Impact

Learnings

Next Steps

Results

Saw a 25% increase in conversion to paid plans, 47% lift in team expansion rate and 12% reduction in churn over 3 months, resulting in 1.53M+ lift in ARR
Contributed to a +15pt NPS lift
Interactions per session:
- New Consumers found value from Mixpanel quickly by doing segmentation within 1 report at least 2 times
- Existing Consumers did weekly segmentation more than 3 times across all reports (Insights, Funnels, Flows and Retention)

Design

Focused on delivering a clean and intuitive interface at mighty speeds

Collaborated with brand to create delightful in product moments

Added dark theme for certain components in the design system (banner and contextual menu) to improve focus and support accessibility preferences

Leadership

Helped product defined better engagement metric for the Consumer segment who are already using the product vs. new customers

Introduced team to advanced prototyping to capture microinteractions within visualizations

Showed the value of attitudinal and qualitative methods to help the Engineering, Product and Design organization uncover deeper insights into user's needs and bahaviors (this helped get support to hire our first UX researcher)

Allow Consumers to do more advanced actions without the query (merging cohorts)
Provide a way for users to annotate their own insights within Mixpanel to enable real-time collaboration; I believe that data exploration doesn't have to be a siloed activity, it can be turned into a team sport
Create learning moments for non technical audience on certain insights (Life-Time-Value) so we truly democratize analysis