Mixpanel VP of Engineering Chinmay Barve began his career at Yahoo Search, then moved to Twitter’s engineering team in 2012 where he helped build infrastructure for key products for the tech giant, including tweets and direct messages. After four years at Twitter, he decided it was time for a change.
Barve accepted a role at Mixpanel in 2016, which offers powerful product analytics everyone can trust, use, and afford. He had heard about the company from product managers and data scientists at Twitter who raved about their experience with the product.
We interviewed Barve to understand how he thinks about building teams and culture.
Q: Mixpanel recently won Comparably’s 2022 Award for Best Engineering Team (which is determined exclusively from employee feedback). What do you think makes the team unique?
I think firstly, we have a very compelling mission, and it’s especially appealing to engineers. We’re trying to solve problems that engineers can relate to.
Next, we have very interesting infrastructure and UX challenges. We process over a trillion data points a month, and that number just keeps growing, so we have a lot of interesting scaling challenges. Most enterprise SaaS companies of our size just keep adding features that their largest customers are asking for. That results in a clunky UX with hundreds of knobs that the end users hate. We take a different approach – we look at data and all the customer feedback, think from the basics, and then come up with solutions that push the boundaries of what’s possible with very thoughtful design. Engineers are an integral part of this process along with product designers and product managers.
Engineering teams have a lot of autonomy and ownership. To make really good decisions autonomously, you need to have access to all relevant information. So we complement that with a culture of transparency. We use Mixpanel heavily at Mixpanel, so everyone has access to business data as well as data on how our users are using our product. Engineers have access to win/loss/churn notes from all major deals, product gaps, and customer support tickets. We collaborate in the open on Slack and share learnings. This culture is very empowering.
Members of the team respect each other, and they feel they can learn from each other. The team has been able to overcome several challenges and has grown the business significantly over the last few years.
All of these things together have led to people getting a lot of learning and growth opportunities and thus staying at the company much longer. I myself started as a TLM (tech lead and manager) in 2016. Our VP of product and design started at Mixpanel as a frontend engineer 10 years ago. If you look at the group of Staff+ engineers, Engineering Managers, and Directors, most of them started as mid-level or senior engineers and grew with the company. The median tenure of that group is over 6 years.
Q: Hiring must be a critical part of building such a strong engineering team and culture. What’s unique about your hiring process?
For us, hiring starts with a long term view on people. We are bringing in problem solvers and owners – teammates with whom we’ll make progress towards our mission and grow the business. So we are very thoughtful about how we go about adding people to the team. We look at a lot of different factors like what skillsets we want to bring in, what will complement the team and whether we have all the things in place to support this person’s growth.
As to what we typically look for while hiring engineers – technical skills are of course very important – can they produce high quality and performant code in a reasonable amount of time? Can they solve ambiguous technical problems? Can they make good technical tradeoffs?
Being technically strong is necessary but not sufficient to get hired. What’s also very important to us is looking for attributes defined by our company cultural values – Customer focus, Lead change, Be open, Results oriented, and last but not the least, One team. We get signals on these attributes through a few different types of interviews.
We also invest a lot of time in training interviewers, calibrating, and constantly innovating and refining our recruiting processes.
Q: Speaking of taking a long term view on people – what are your thoughts on the movement and ambiguity in the tech space right now? So many people have been laid off and are looking for new opportunities. What does Mixpanel have to offer them?
It’s very upsetting to see over tens of thousands of people losing their jobs in a matter of a few weeks. A lot of it was because of over-hiring.
There are a few different things that make Mixpanel a really good place for candidates to consider in this climate. For starters, as I mentioned earlier, one of the things we do differently is take a very thoughtful approach to hiring. We don’t go on hiring sprees.
We’re a unicorn with more than 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue (which makes us a “centaur”, apparently). We raised a round of funding just over a year ago, and we’re growing at a very healthy rate with a very low burn rate. We adopted a strategy of sustainable growth 3 years ago, as opposed to the “growth at all costs” strategy that most companies were adopting at that time. Investors have started putting a lot of weight on sustainability again.
Lastly, we are transparent not only internally, but also with candidates we make offers to. We want them to make the best decision, so we give them a lot of information about our financials, their stock grant and business outlook. And it’s not just about financial information – they get to meet a lot of people who they’ll be working with daily and understand what it’ll be like to work at Mixpanel.
Q: Switching gears to a bit more personal questions. When you were very early in your career, what did you not know that you know now? What advice would you give to new grads?
You don’t realize it at that time, but you can take so much risk early in your career compared to later on. You have fewer responsibilities and little to lose.
Also, I underestimated how much impact I can have as a new college grad. Sure, you have to spend some time learning the ropes, but you can apply first principles thinking, challenge the status quo, innovate, and have a meaningful impact. My advice would be to join a place where the people and culture support this.
I didn’t understand equity compensation very well early on. I think there’s more awareness about it these days, but I feel most new grads still don’t fully get it. There are two parts to this problem – one is understanding how equity works – most new grads are intimidated by legal documents; and the other is, understanding that it’s an ownership stake in the company that you can affect yourself, and shouldn’t be equated to cash compensation. My advice to new grads would be to join a place that’s transparent about how their equity works and where you can have a direct impact on the value of your stocks.
One thing I’d say I did understand intuitively early on and got right was surrounding myself with really talented people who wanted to solve meaningful problems. But sometimes new grads don’t realize the importance of that, so I’ll add that to the list as well.
Q: Can you tell us a bit more about how you yourself grew as an engineer and as a leader? How do you use your experiences to help others grow?
I’m very mission-driven and at every step in my career, I was driven by the goal of adding value to customers and to our business. I’d take on whatever problems came our way while trying to achieve those goals, and I’d solve them successfully. So naturally, my scope would always end up expanding, and I’d have a high impact. Next time, I would be entrusted with bigger problems and more ambitious goals. Over time I started tackling people issues and started helping with team building because those things were clearly very important to creating value and making progress towards our mission.
Every time I got a significantly larger responsibility, I had to go through a steeper-than-expected learning curve. I use my learnings that I had through these various phases of growth to coach engineers and leaders. For example, I use a lot of my personal experiences to guide people through becoming a staff engineer, or tech lead or a manager. Another thing I also do is, put people in an environment where they can think from the basics, build a culture that supports that, and then provide coaching to accelerate their learning. I think I’ve grown the most when I’ve reflected deeply on my experiences and made fundamental changes to how I think.
