Iyengar: Data warehouses are poor analytical tools for event sequences
Vijay Iyengar · An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey | Vijay Iyengar · Jan 26, 2023 · at 39:25
Vijay Iyengar, Head of Product at Mixpanel, explains why SQL-based data warehouses are ill-suited for complex behavioral analytics.
0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 15.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Data Warehouse is becoming the loading dock for all of this data, which can be very easily modeled as events. But it's not a very great analytical tool for events because SQL is optimized for rows and tables and joints and not events and sequences of events and segmentations of events.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Vijay Iyengar
Mixpanel Head of Product: Client-Side SDK Tracking Is Analytics' Biggest Mistake
“I think the biggest mistake is, is setting up analytics using client-side SDKs, client-side tracking.”
Mixpanel set roadmap by sorting customer churn reasons descending by ARR
“We took all the churn reasons that our customer success and sales teams had been painstakingly collecting for years, grouped them by category, which was like roughly product features we needed to build. Sorted descending by ARR, took the top 10 things and made…”
Iyengar: Highly competitive markets require optimizing product development speed over holistic design
“In a very competitive context where there are just table stakes features that customers need and that's been validated by the market, you need to optimize for speed more so than anything else. But it is an approach that outlives its usefulness pretty fast.”
Iyengar: Fund new product expansion with profits or VC, not core personnel
“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, you know, the profits that come out of that core into the next venture, like invest profits and not people. Or venture…”
Vijay Iyengar: RICE Framework Prematurely Deprioritizes High-Impact Bets
“One of the traps with RICE that we observed is that the C and E, the confidence and effort, Tends to cause you to prematurely deprioritize potentially high-reach, high-impact bets, really innovative things.”
Vijay Iyengar: Adopting Basecamp's Shape Up Process Halfway Will Fail
“I think that rigor, like the rigor they applied to that across the board, you need to do it all the way. You can't adopt the process halfway, I think is the challenge. Otherwise you end up with people shipping like milestone one and then moving on, which is no…”