An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product)

**Vijay Iyengar** (0:00)
The issue for us at the time was that we took people away from the investment in our core product to go do those other things.
We moved people, right? And so the trap there is that you leave yourself right for disruption in your core because someone else can out invest you in that core. And so if you're the leader in some core product, our takeaway here is you should continue to out invest everyone else in that core and then invest the profits that come out of that core into the next venture. Like invest profits and not people or venture capital, which is maybe like net present value of profits or something to that effect. But don't take people away from the core to go to these other things because then you end up distracted.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:39)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Today, my guest is Vijay Iyengar. Vijay is currently head of product at Mixpanel. He actually has a very similar career trajectory to myself, where he started as an ENG intern at Amazon, then he was an engineer for a while at Uber, then he became an ENG manager at Mixpanel, but then he shifted from an ENG manager to director of product and now head of product at Mixpanel. You don't often see people moving from an ENG leadership role straight to director of product, so it was really interesting to hear what he took from his ENG experience and brought into his approach to product leadership. But we spend the bulk of our time talking about what he's learned from the journey that Mixpanel has been on, where they started with a simple product and scaled to a number of different products, solving many problems for customers, and then made the hard decision to scale back to just a single core focused analytics product. We talk about why they made that choice, what they learned about when it makes sense to expand to new products, and when you probably shouldn't, and how they approach that organizationally. They also talk about how Mixpanel built product, how they think about product philosophy, how they prioritize, and also what you're probably doing wrong in how you set up your analytics for your own product. With that, I bring you Vijay Iyengar, after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.
This episode is brought to you by Pando, the always on employee performance platform. How much do you love the performance review process?
Yeah, it's time-consuming, subjective, biased, and there's rarely any transparency. With the rapid shift to distributed work, it's a struggle to create the structure and transparency that you want to help your employees have the highest impact and growth in their careers. Pando is disrupting the old paradigm of performance management, including a continuous employee-centric approach so employees stay engaged, see their progression in real-time and know exactly when and how they can level up. With Pando, managers can leverage competency-based frameworks to effectively coach and develop their teams and align on consistent growth standards resulting in higher quality feedback and higher performing teams. Visit pando.com/lenny for more info and get a special discount when you sign up and reference this podcast. That's pando.com/lenny.
This episode is brought to you by Notion. If you haven't heard of Notion, where have you been? I use Notion to coordinate this very podcast, including my content calendar, my sponsors, and prepping guests for launch of each episode. Notion is an all-in-one team collaboration tool that combines note-taking, document sharing, wikis, project management, and much more into one space that's simple, powerful, and beautifully designed. And not only does it allow you to be more efficient in your work life, but you can easily transition to using it in your personal life, which is another feature that truly sets Notion apart. The other day, I started a home project and immediately opened up Notion to help me organize it all. Learn more and get started for free at notion.com/lenny'spod. Take the first step towards an organized, happy team today. Again, at notion.com/lenny'spod.
Vijay, welcome to the podcast.

**Vijay Iyengar** (3:52)
Hey, Lenny, great to be here. Huge fan of the pod, so glad I can contribute.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:57)
I definitely want to talk about Mixpanel's journey, both as a product team and a product. But before we get there, as an engineer, you were a long-time engineer and then you became a product leader. Is there anything you had to unlearn as an engineer in the way you thought about leadership and product and business?

**Vijay Iyengar** (4:13)
One of the things that you've been engineering for a while is that you develop this tendency to immediately respond with no to new ideas.