Six-Month Bets with a Collapsed W
Leaders ideate inside the teams' jam sessions instead of reviewing their output from outside.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 88%
Mixpanel plans on a six-month horizon around durable, paired problems (power vs simplicity, trust vs speed), with each team owning both sides of a tension so they must confront the trade-off. The planning artefact is a 'bet' — problem, evidence of demand, reach/impact, hypothesis, plan to win, measure of success. The distinctive move: instead of the classic W (memo → teams generate → review → teams iterate → finalise), the head of product and head of design collapse the middle by joining the teams' ideation sessions directly.
Origin
Mixpanel's planning process as run by Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product) and the head of design, described from their January 2023 planning cycle. The bet anatomy is loosely OKR-adjacent; the collapsed-W is their own adaptation, justified by the small size of the product team.
Core principles
- 01Organise teams around long-lived problems and missions, not features or surfaces.
- 02Deliberately give one team both sides of a tension (e.g. power and simplicity) so they are forced to confront and beat the trade-off rather than externalise it.
- 03A bet's anatomy: the problem, the hypothesis on the solution, a plan to win, and a way to measure that you got there.
- 04If you only do 10-12 things a half, you can afford to do something that doesn't scale — like leaders sitting in the jam sessions.
- 05High-bandwidth co-ideation is messier and less structured than a review gate, but produces higher confidence and better alignment on why decisions were made.
How to run it
- 1
Organise teams around paired, long-lived problems
Identify the unsolved problems in your domain — for Mixpanel: more power, more simplicity, better data trust, faster onboarding, better collaboration, better price-performance — and stand up cross-functional EPD teams that own them as missions. Pair the ones that are in tension.
Pro tip The core analysis team owns both power and simplicity precisely because those pull against each other. One owner means the trade-off gets beaten, not punted.
- 2
Write the leadership strategy memo
The leadership team writes a memo stating where the company is going in the next year and how the product team can contribute most, establishing the key pillars. Share it with the teams.
- 3
Teams do two weeks of pre-work
Teams combine the memo with the quantitative and qualitative context they consume continuously about their problem and their customers. Mixpanel ran this as roughly two weeks in December.
- 4
Collapse the W: leaders ideate inside the sessions
Instead of teams generating bets and leaders reviewing them from outside, the head of product and head of design join the jam sessions and participate in solution discovery — adding sticky notes and ideas themselves. Mixpanel ran this as a two-week solutioning sprint in January.
Pro tip This works because the team is small: ~10-12 bets a half, not 50. Small numbers license the unscalable, high-bandwidth approach.
Watch out Expect the phase to feel messy and unstructured — leaders are contributing, not adjudicating. If you cannot tolerate that, don't collapse the W.
- 5
Produce three linked artefacts
1) A Notion database of bets, one page per bet, from a template: what problem are we solving, what's the evidence of demand, what's the reach/impact, how do we know we're successful, what's the key driving hypothesis behind the solution, and a rough plan. 2) A presentation, one slide per bet. 3) An execution doc — sequencing, staffing, dependency elimination — contributed by engineering.
Pro tip Keeping the three linked means the pitch and the execution plan never drift from the underlying bet.
- 6
Close with a company roadshow
Present the bets to the rest of the company and gather feedback.
In the wild
Leadership wrote the strategy memo; teams did two weeks of pre-work in December; a two-week solutioning and ideation sprint ran in the first half of January, with the head of product and head of design physically inside the teams' jam sessions rather than reviewing their output; the cycle closed with a roadshow to the company.
→ Teams left more confident in their bets because more thought had gone into them, and more aligned top-to-bottom on why particular decisions were made.
Mixpanel's core analysis team is given ownership of both 'more power' and 'more simplicity' as long-lived missions — problems that directly trade off against each other.
→ The tension is confronted inside one team that has to beat the trade-off, rather than being adjudicated between two teams each advocating one side.
Common mistakes
Splitting a tension across two teams
If one team owns power and another owns simplicity, the trade-off becomes a political negotiation instead of a design problem. Mixpanel deliberately gives both to one team so they are forced to confront it.
Collapsing the W at the wrong scale
Leaders joining every ideation session is explicitly a thing that doesn't scale. It works at ~10-12 bets a half. At 50 bets, you need the review-gate structure back.
Producing a bets doc with no execution artefact
The bets database and the presentation are strategy; without the linked engineering-contributed sequencing, staffing, and dependency plan, the bets have no path to being real.
Is it for you?
Best for
Heads of product at small-to-mid product orgs (roughly 10-12 bets per half-year) who want leadership judgment injected into planning without a heavyweight review gate
Not ideal for
Large product organisations running dozens of parallel bets, where leaders cannot be present in every ideation session
From the transcript
“we largely organize our teams around those problems and those missions”
“we kind of collapse the middle part of the W where myself and our head of design actually spend time”
“what problem are we solving what's the evidence of demand what's the region impact of this problem how do we know we're successful”
From the episode
An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey
Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product)