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  • Home
  • CEO diaries
    • After the HN launch
    • Remote companies can be too asynchronous
    • The time before YC
    • Winning from the back - late mover advantage
    • Optimize for not breaking up with your co-founder
    • Cancer and revenue - the latest board meeting
    • "How come your website is so nice?"
    • Things I learned last year
    • Our new objective: Nail Self Serve
    • How we found our Ideal Customer Profile
    • Tell me about features, not benefits
    • The magic of a Hacker News Pre-Mortem
    • How to run a transparent startup
    • How we justified quitting our jobs and financing PostHog early on
    • How we made something people want
    • Moving to San Francisco
    • Pivot to PostHog
    • Counterintuitive lessons about our pricing
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • How we raised $3M for an open source project
    • A story about pivots
    • The YC Interview
    • Raising money is less stressful than bootstrapping
    • What motivates me as a CEO
    • The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)
    • Writing for developers
    • Reflecting on YC, 2 years on
  • Company & culture
    • How we do meetings at PostHog
  • Comparisons
    • PostHog vs Matomo
    • PostHog vs Amplitude
    • Why I ditched Google Analytics and Mixpanel for PostHog
  • Engineering
    • Enabling zero downtime data migrations for self-hosted users
    • Automating a software company with GitHub Actions
    • How to speed up ClickHouse queries using materialized columns
    • In-depth: ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • Frontend filters & backend SQL - A chat with Eric Duong, Sam Winslow, James Greenhill, and Buddy Williams
    • PostHog Joins Hacktoberfest 2020
    • How PostHog built an app server (from MVP to billions of events)
    • How we’re making PostHog deployments easier
    • Solving the mystery of PostHog’s missing session recordings
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • The secrets of PostHog query performance
    • Benchmarking the impact of session recording on performance
    • The state of plugins on PostHog
    • We ship whenever
  • General
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • How we designed the PostHog mascot
    • Why you may not need a sales team
    • A story about pivots
  • Guides
    • Introduction to self-service analytics
    • Building an AARRR pirate funnel (how and why)
    • 5 essential tips for Customer Success teams on PostHog
    • 5 analytics ideas for marketing teams using PostHog
    • Automating a software company with GitHub Actions
    • The most useful B2B SaaS product metrics
    • The 7 best GDPR-compliant analytics tools
    • The best HIPAA-compliant A/B testing tools
    • The 5 best free and open-source A/B testing tools
    • The 4 best HIPAA-compliant analytics tools
    • The best open-source analytics and data tools
    • Open source (and self-hosted) alternatives to Hotjar & FullStory
    • The two ways to estimate your monthly event usage
    • How to speed up ClickHouse queries using materialized columns
    • In-depth: ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL
    • Google is about to make it a lot harder to track website and app users without third-party cookies
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • 5 essential PostHog apps for new users
    • 5 events all teams should track with PostHog
    • What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
    • How to get the first 10 paying customers for your devtool company (and other customer acquisition tips)
    • The best GA4 alternatives for apps and websites
    • How to harness the awesome power of growth loops
    • What is user segmentation?
    • How to measure product engagement
    • How to achieve B2B product market fit
    • How to work out what your users really need
    • How we do hiring & HR at PostHog
    • How we turned ClickHouse into our event mansion
    • An introduction to customer retention
    • Is Google Analytics HIPAA compliant?
    • Finding your North Star metric and why it matters
    • How we monetized our open source devtool
    • Building an open source data stack
    • How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
    • Permissions and projects in PostHog, explained
    • How (and why) our marketing team uses PostHog
    • PostHog vs Matomo
    • PostHog vs Amplitude
    • Product engineer vs software engineer: what's the difference?
    • Don’t bother securing your trademarks in the beginning
    • How to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations (and how we're doing it at PostHog)
    • The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
    • How (and why) to track your website with PostHog
    • 22 ways PostHog makes it easier to build great products
    • What is a product engineer (and why they're awesome)
    • A simple guide to personal data and PII
    • An introduction to product analytics and how it works
    • What is SSO and why you should enable it for PostHog
    • The 3 critical reasons companies choose self-hosted analytics
  • HogMail
    • HogMail #14
    • HogMail #15
    • HogMail #16
    • HogMail #17: The personal traits that can't be taught
    • HogMail #18: What can SaaS learn from the New York Times?
  • Inside PostHog
    • PostHog raises $15 million Series B for open source product analytics
    • A non-coders thoughts on ‘Everybody Codes’ - Part Two
    • A non-coder's thoughts on an 'Everybody Codes' culture
    • After the HN launch
    • Remote companies can be too asynchronous
    • The time before YC
    • How PostHog uses Wren to offset carbon emissions during offsites
    • Winning from the back - late mover advantage
    • Optimize for not breaking up with your co-founder
    • Cancer and revenue - the latest board meeting
    • "How come your website is so nice?"
    • Things I learned last year
    • Our new objective: Nail Self Serve
    • How we found our Ideal Customer Profile
    • How we do customer support at our open source devtool company
    • The importance of dogfooding - Why product managers should use their product as much as their users
    • How we designed the PostHog mascot
    • Using Gatsby and Puppeteer to create dynamic Open Graph images
    • Creating an employee-friendly startup share option scheme
    • Tell me about features, not benefits
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • The magic of a Hacker News Pre-Mortem
    • HostHogs - free drinks, free pizza and frequently asked questions
    • How to run a transparent startup
    • How we do hiring & HR at PostHog
    • How PostHog built an app server (from MVP to billions of events)
    • How we turned ClickHouse into our event mansion
    • How we justified quitting our jobs and financing PostHog early on
    • Introducing Phil Leggetter, our new head of Developer Relations
    • Using Google Analytics was deemed 'illegal' in some EU countries. We built a microsite in 48 hours to capitalize on the news.
    • Introducing Joe Martin - Our first Product Marketer
    • How we made something people want
    • How we do meetings at PostHog
    • Solving the mystery of PostHog’s missing session recordings
    • Moving to San Francisco
    • How PostHog's new VP focused the company on nailing funnels in his first week
    • An engineer's guide to picking a cofounder
    • Pivot to PostHog
    • How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
    • PostHog raises $12 million in funding led by GV and Y Combinator
    • What we learned about hiring from our first five employees
    • How (and why) our marketing team uses PostHog
    • How we rebranded PostHog in four weeks - a postmortem
    • Counterintuitive lessons about our pricing
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • What's the true role of a product team at an engineering-led organization?
    • Building an all-remote company from scratch
    • How we raised $3M for an open source project
    • All the cool things we built at our Rome hackathon
    • Content marketing strategy for devtool companies - How we do it at PostHog
    • How to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations (and how we're doing it at PostHog)
    • Benchmarking the impact of session recording on performance
    • Speeding up PostHog builds with Depot
    • How to run finance at your startup without hiring a finance person
    • How to choose job titles in your early stage startup
    • Startups, stop treating engineers like a different species
    • The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
    • A story about pivots
    • The YC Interview
    • Why we ditched ‘talk to sales’ for transparent pricing
    • Raising money is less stressful than bootstrapping
    • What motivates me as a CEO
    • The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)
    • Why I ditched Google Analytics and Mixpanel for PostHog
    • Why infrastructure is a competitive advantage for us
    • Why we raised a $15m Series B ahead of schedule
    • Writing for developers
    • Reflecting on YC, 2 years on
    • YC adds PostHog to top valued companies for July 2021
  • Launch week
    • Introducing Collaboration for PostHog
    • Introducing Data Management for PostHog
    • What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
    • How we’re making PostHog deployments easier
    • PostHog Launch Week I: A Universe of New Features
    • The secrets of PostHog query performance
  • Open source
    • The Early Days of GitLab - A Chat with Sid Sijbrandij
    • The 5 best free and open-source A/B testing tools
    • The 6 best free and open-source feature flag tools
    • The best open-source analytics and data tools
    • Open source (and self-hosted) alternatives to Hotjar & FullStory
    • How we do customer support at our open source devtool company
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • PostHog Joins Hacktoberfest 2020
    • Give Back Friday with PostHog
    • Building an open source data science publishing platform - An interview with Datapane CEO, Leo Anthias
    • How we monetized our open source devtool
    • Open source is eating SaaS
    • Building an open source data stack
    • Should open source projects track you?
    • PostHog vs Amplitude
    • How we raised $3M for an open source project
    • Why open-source projects are essential for large businesses
    • Send love to open-source projects on Valentine's Day
    • Speeding up PostHog builds with Depot
    • The 3 critical reasons companies choose self-hosted analytics
  • PostHog Academy
    • What is user segmentation?
    • How to measure product engagement
    • How to achieve B2B product market fit
    • How to work out what your users really need
    • An introduction to customer retention
    • An introduction to product analytics and how it works
  • Privacy
    • The 7 best GDPR-compliant analytics tools
    • The best HIPAA-compliant A/B testing tools
    • The 4 best HIPAA-compliant analytics tools
    • Google is about to make it a lot harder to track website and app users without third-party cookies
    • A new 'Privacy Shield' won't solve big tech's GDPR problem
    • Is Google Analytics HIPAA compliant?
    • A simple guide to personal data and PII
  • Product analytics
    • Introduction to self-service analytics
    • Building an AARRR pirate funnel (how and why)
    • The two ways to estimate your monthly event usage
    • How to harness the awesome power of growth loops
    • What is user segmentation?
    • How to measure product engagement
    • How to achieve B2B product market fit
    • How to work out what your users really need
    • An introduction to customer retention
    • Is autocapture ‘still’ bad?
    • Finding your North Star metric and why it matters
    • How PostHog's new VP focused the company on nailing funnels in his first week
    • What's the true role of a product team at an engineering-led organization?
    • How to turn your engineers into product people
    • 22 ways PostHog makes it easier to build great products
    • An introduction to product analytics and how it works
  • Product updates
    • Why we're giving away 100 times more cloud usage, free
    • Enabling zero downtime data migrations for self-hosted users
    • Introducing the Avo Inspector app
    • We just made PostHog Open Source 1000x more scalable via ClickHouse
    • Introducing Collaboration for PostHog
    • Introducing Data Management for PostHog
    • What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
    • Group Analytics is now available in PostHog
    • You can now reverse ETL into PostHog with Hightouch
    • How we’re making PostHog deployments easier
    • PostHog Launch Week I: A Universe of New Features
    • How we’re improving performance by combining persons and events
    • PostHog teams up with Altinity
    • Introducing PostHog Cloud EU
    • Restack joins the PostHog Marketplace
    • PostHog is now available on Segment!
    • The secrets of PostHog query performance
    • Why we're removing the sessions page
    • Array 1.0.10
    • Array 1.0.11
    • Array 1.0.8
    • Array 1.0.9
    • Array 1.1.0
    • Array 1.11.0
    • Array 1.10.0
    • Array 1.12.0
    • Array 1.13.0
    • Array 1.14.0
    • Array 1.15.0
    • Array 1.16.0
    • Array 1.17.0
    • Array 1.18.0
    • Array 1.2.0
    • Array 1.19.0
    • Array 1.20.0
    • Array 1.22.0
    • Array 1.21.0
    • Array 1.23.0
    • Array 1.24.0
    • Array 1.25.0
    • Array 1.27.0
    • Array 1.28.0
    • Array 1.29.0
    • Array 1.26.0
    • Array 1.3.0
    • Array 1.30.0
    • Array 1.31.0
    • Array 1.32.0
    • Array 1.33.0
    • Array 1.34.0
    • Array 1.35.0: Introducing SAML, world map view and new plugins
    • Array 1.37.0: Cohorts 2.0 and event & property detail pages
    • Array 1.36.0: Introducing AND/OR filtering, timezone support and universal search
    • Array 1.38.0: Exports, subscriptions and session analysis
    • Array 1.39.0: Betas, persons, events and libraries
    • Array 1.4.0
    • Array 1.40.0: Interface improvements and more!
    • Array 1.42.0: Get beta features via our roadmap!
    • Array 1.5.0
    • Array 1.41.0: Improving performance by up to 400%
    • Array 1.6.0
    • Array 1.7.0
    • Array 1.8.0
    • Array 1.9.0
    • Array 1.0.0
    • The state of plugins on PostHog
  • Release notes
    • Introducing the Avo Inspector app
    • How we’re improving performance by combining persons and events
    • Array 1.0.10
    • Array 1.0.11
    • Array 1.0.8
    • Array 1.0.9
    • Array 1.1.0
    • Array 1.11.0
    • Array 1.10.0
    • Array 1.12.0
    • Array 1.13.0
    • Array 1.14.0
    • Array 1.15.0
    • Array 1.16.0
    • Array 1.17.0
    • Array 1.18.0
    • Array 1.2.0
    • Array 1.19.0
    • Array 1.20.0
    • Array 1.22.0
    • Array 1.21.0
    • Array 1.23.0
    • Array 1.24.0
    • Array 1.25.0
    • Array 1.27.0
    • Array 1.28.0
    • Array 1.29.0
    • Array 1.26.0
    • Array 1.3.0
    • Array 1.30.0
    • Array 1.31.0
    • Array 1.32.0
    • Array 1.33.0
    • Array 1.34.0
    • Array 1.35.0: Introducing SAML, world map view and new plugins
    • Array 1.37.0: Cohorts 2.0 and event & property detail pages
    • Array 1.36.0: Introducing AND/OR filtering, timezone support and universal search
    • Array 1.38.0: Exports, subscriptions and session analysis
    • Array 1.39.0: Betas, persons, events and libraries
    • Array 1.4.0
    • Array 1.40.0: Interface improvements and more!
    • Array 1.42.0: Get beta features via our roadmap!
    • Array 1.5.0
    • Array 1.41.0: Improving performance by up to 400%
    • Array 1.6.0
    • Array 1.7.0
    • Array 1.8.0
    • Array 1.9.0
    • Array 1.0.0
  • Startups
    • A non-coder's thoughts on an 'Everybody Codes' culture
    • How we found our Ideal Customer Profile
    • Creating an employee-friendly startup share option scheme
    • How to get the first 10 paying customers for your devtool company (and other customer acquisition tips)
    • How to run a transparent startup
    • Building an open source data science publishing platform - An interview with Datapane CEO, Leo Anthias
    • How we made something people want
    • How we monetized our open source devtool
    • Should open source projects track you?
    • An engineer's guide to picking a cofounder
    • How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
    • What we learned about hiring from our first five employees
    • How we rebranded PostHog in four weeks - a postmortem
    • Product engineer vs software engineer: what's the difference?
    • What's the true role of a product team at an engineering-led organization?
    • Why you may not need a sales team
    • Don’t bother securing your trademarks in the beginning
    • Building an all-remote company from scratch
    • All the cool things we built at our Rome hackathon
    • Content marketing strategy for devtool companies - How we do it at PostHog
    • Why open-source projects are essential for large businesses
    • How to run finance at your startup without hiring a finance person
    • How to choose job titles in your early stage startup
    • Startups, stop treating engineers like a different species
    • The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
    • How to turn your engineers into product people
    • Raising money is less stressful than bootstrapping
    • What is a product engineer (and why they're awesome)
    • Writing for developers
    • Reflecting on YC, 2 years on
  • Using PostHog
    • 5 essential tips for Customer Success teams on PostHog
    • 5 analytics ideas for marketing teams using PostHog
    • 5 essential PostHog apps for new users
    • 5 events all teams should track with PostHog
    • Permissions and projects in PostHog, explained
    • How (and why) our marketing team uses PostHog
    • How (and why) to track your website with PostHog
    • What is SSO and why you should enable it for PostHog
  • Home
  • CEO diaries
    • After the HN launch
    • Remote companies can be too asynchronous
    • The time before YC
    • Winning from the back - late mover advantage
    • Optimize for not breaking up with your co-founder
    • Cancer and revenue - the latest board meeting
    • "How come your website is so nice?"
    • Things I learned last year
    • Our new objective: Nail Self Serve
    • How we found our Ideal Customer Profile
    • Tell me about features, not benefits
    • The magic of a Hacker News Pre-Mortem
    • How to run a transparent startup
    • How we justified quitting our jobs and financing PostHog early on
    • How we made something people want
    • Moving to San Francisco
    • Pivot to PostHog
    • Counterintuitive lessons about our pricing
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • How we raised $3M for an open source project
    • A story about pivots
    • The YC Interview
    • Raising money is less stressful than bootstrapping
    • What motivates me as a CEO
    • The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)
    • Writing for developers
    • Reflecting on YC, 2 years on
  • Company & culture
    • How we do meetings at PostHog
  • Comparisons
    • PostHog vs Matomo
    • PostHog vs Amplitude
    • Why I ditched Google Analytics and Mixpanel for PostHog
  • Engineering
    • Enabling zero downtime data migrations for self-hosted users
    • Automating a software company with GitHub Actions
    • How to speed up ClickHouse queries using materialized columns
    • In-depth: ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • Frontend filters & backend SQL - A chat with Eric Duong, Sam Winslow, James Greenhill, and Buddy Williams
    • PostHog Joins Hacktoberfest 2020
    • How PostHog built an app server (from MVP to billions of events)
    • How we’re making PostHog deployments easier
    • Solving the mystery of PostHog’s missing session recordings
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • The secrets of PostHog query performance
    • Benchmarking the impact of session recording on performance
    • The state of plugins on PostHog
    • We ship whenever
  • General
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • How we designed the PostHog mascot
    • Why you may not need a sales team
    • A story about pivots
  • Guides
    • Introduction to self-service analytics
    • Building an AARRR pirate funnel (how and why)
    • 5 essential tips for Customer Success teams on PostHog
    • 5 analytics ideas for marketing teams using PostHog
    • Automating a software company with GitHub Actions
    • The most useful B2B SaaS product metrics
    • The 7 best GDPR-compliant analytics tools
    • The best HIPAA-compliant A/B testing tools
    • The 5 best free and open-source A/B testing tools
    • The 4 best HIPAA-compliant analytics tools
    • The best open-source analytics and data tools
    • Open source (and self-hosted) alternatives to Hotjar & FullStory
    • The two ways to estimate your monthly event usage
    • How to speed up ClickHouse queries using materialized columns
    • In-depth: ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL
    • Google is about to make it a lot harder to track website and app users without third-party cookies
    • Setting up super fast Cypress tests on GitHub Actions
    • 5 essential PostHog apps for new users
    • 5 events all teams should track with PostHog
    • What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
    • How to get the first 10 paying customers for your devtool company (and other customer acquisition tips)
    • The best GA4 alternatives for apps and websites
    • How to harness the awesome power of growth loops
    • What is user segmentation?
    • How to measure product engagement
    • How to achieve B2B product market fit
    • How to work out what your users really need
    • How we do hiring & HR at PostHog
    • How we turned ClickHouse into our event mansion
    • An introduction to customer retention
    • Is Google Analytics HIPAA compliant?
    • Finding your North Star metric and why it matters
    • How we monetized our open source devtool
    • Building an open source data stack
    • How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
    • Permissions and projects in PostHog, explained
    • How (and why) our marketing team uses PostHog
    • PostHog vs Matomo
    • PostHog vs Amplitude
    • Product engineer vs software engineer: what's the difference?
    • Don’t bother securing your trademarks in the beginning
    • How to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations (and how we're doing it at PostHog)
    • The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
    • How (and why) to track your website with PostHog
    • 22 ways PostHog makes it easier to build great products
    • What is a product engineer (and why they're awesome)
    • A simple guide to personal data and PII
    • An introduction to product analytics and how it works
    • What is SSO and why you should enable it for PostHog
    • The 3 critical reasons companies choose self-hosted analytics
  • HogMail
    • HogMail #14
    • HogMail #15
    • HogMail #16
    • HogMail #17: The personal traits that can't be taught
    • HogMail #18: What can SaaS learn from the New York Times?
  • Inside PostHog
    • PostHog raises $15 million Series B for open source product analytics
    • A non-coders thoughts on ‘Everybody Codes’ - Part Two
    • A non-coder's thoughts on an 'Everybody Codes' culture
    • After the HN launch
    • Remote companies can be too asynchronous
    • The time before YC
    • How PostHog uses Wren to offset carbon emissions during offsites
    • Winning from the back - late mover advantage
    • Optimize for not breaking up with your co-founder
    • Cancer and revenue - the latest board meeting
    • "How come your website is so nice?"
    • Things I learned last year
    • Our new objective: Nail Self Serve
    • How we found our Ideal Customer Profile
    • How we do customer support at our open source devtool company
    • The importance of dogfooding - Why product managers should use their product as much as their users
    • How we designed the PostHog mascot
    • Using Gatsby and Puppeteer to create dynamic Open Graph images
    • Creating an employee-friendly startup share option scheme
    • Tell me about features, not benefits
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • The magic of a Hacker News Pre-Mortem
    • HostHogs - free drinks, free pizza and frequently asked questions
    • How to run a transparent startup
    • How we do hiring & HR at PostHog
    • How PostHog built an app server (from MVP to billions of events)
    • How we turned ClickHouse into our event mansion
    • How we justified quitting our jobs and financing PostHog early on
    • Introducing Phil Leggetter, our new head of Developer Relations
    • Using Google Analytics was deemed 'illegal' in some EU countries. We built a microsite in 48 hours to capitalize on the news.
    • Introducing Joe Martin - Our first Product Marketer
    • How we made something people want
    • How we do meetings at PostHog
    • Solving the mystery of PostHog’s missing session recordings
    • Moving to San Francisco
    • How PostHog's new VP focused the company on nailing funnels in his first week
    • An engineer's guide to picking a cofounder
    • Pivot to PostHog
    • How to plan a killer company offsite in just 8 weeks
    • PostHog raises $12 million in funding led by GV and Y Combinator
    • What we learned about hiring from our first five employees
    • How (and why) our marketing team uses PostHog
    • How we rebranded PostHog in four weeks - a postmortem
    • Counterintuitive lessons about our pricing
    • I used to think you don't need product people. I was wrong.
    • What's the true role of a product team at an engineering-led organization?
    • Building an all-remote company from scratch
    • How we raised $3M for an open source project
    • All the cool things we built at our Rome hackathon
    • Content marketing strategy for devtool companies - How we do it at PostHog
    • How to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations (and how we're doing it at PostHog)
    • Benchmarking the impact of session recording on performance
    • Speeding up PostHog builds with Depot
    • How to run finance at your startup without hiring a finance person
    • How to choose job titles in your early stage startup
    • Startups, stop treating engineers like a different species
    • The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
    • A story about pivots
    • The YC Interview
    • Why we ditched ‘talk to sales’ for transparent pricing
    • Raising money is less stressful than bootstrapping
    • What motivates me as a CEO
    • The really important job interview questions engineers should ask (but don't)
    • Why I ditched Google Analytics and Mixpanel for PostHog
    • Why infrastructure is a competitive advantage for us
    • Why we raised a $15m Series B ahead of schedule
    • Writing for developers
    • Reflecting on YC, 2 years on
    • YC adds PostHog to top valued companies for July 2021
  • Launch week
    • Introducing Collaboration for PostHog
    • Introducing Data Management for PostHog
    • What launching Experimentation taught us about running effective A/B tests
    • How we’re making PostHog deployments easier
    • PostHog Launch Week I: A Universe of New Features
    • The secrets of PostHog query performance
  • Open source
    • The Early Days of GitLab - A Chat with Sid Sijbrandij
    • The 5 best free and open-source A/B testing tools
    • The 6 best free and open-source feature flag tools
    • The best open-source analytics and data tools
    • Open source (and self-hosted) alternatives to Hotjar & FullStory
    • How we do customer support at our open source devtool company
    • How I learned to love feedback loops (and make better products)
    • PostHog Joins Hacktoberfest 2020
    • Give Back Friday with PostHog
    • Building an open source data science publishing platform - An interview with Datapane CEO, Leo Anthias
    • How we monetized our open source devtool
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How we do meetings at PostHog

Best practices for productive meetings at your startup

Ever had one of those days where you do nothing but hop into one meeting after another? Even worse is the 30-minute break between meetings which seems like enough time to squeeze in some work — but is an illusion.

via GIPHY

Meetings are necessary, as they can speed up collaboration and build team rapport — especially in a remote work setting where giving people different ways to communicate is better for diversity.

But there are severe drawbacks when meeting culture takes over. Not only do meetings disrupt flow, but they also allow unprepared attendees to "think on your time" instead of arriving prepared to share concrete ideas. The numbers support this, too:

Poorly organized meetings cost U.S. businesses $399 billion a year. (Doodle State of Meetings Report, 2019)

Let me share with you how PostHog does meetings. We’re constantly improving our process and would love to hear how your team tackles meetings.

Limit meeting days

Meeting-free days allow more deep work to get done. At PostHog, we've mandated Tuesdays and Thursdays as meeting-free days, which has had a significant impact on our team’s productivity. Mondays are reserved for company updates and Wednesdays for team updates. Every 2nd Friday, we do a retrospective planning session with life stories in between. We also use meetings for SuperDays, one-to-one coffee breaks (one every two weeks), or optional group socials (once per week).

"Meeting-free Tuesdays & Thursdays have increased the number of high-value tasks I get done than I did previously. If I were starting another company, I'd do exactly what we're doing here." — Charles Cook, Head of Business Ops @ PostHog

Our meeting-free days create a natural cadence for the week, with everyone knowing they will alternate between ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ days with plenty of time in between to get good work done. In practice, while Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are meeting days, only a few people will use up that time for important work, such as James or Yakko; or Eltje, our People Ops & Talent Manager, speaking to candidates.

"I think PostHog’s meeting policy is a good setup and that we have the right balance with an extra day towards meetings." — Kunal Pathak, Growth Engineer @ PostHog

Keep meetings short and to the point

At PostHog, we do an average of 30 minutes for internal meetings and slightly longer for interviews so that candidates have fewer meetings overall. By design, shorter meetings force you to align your thoughts before you get on the call, ensuring that you make the most of your allocated time.

For anything longer than a 30-minute call, write your points down in advance so that the other attendees can respond in detail. Not only does this asynchronous approach improve everyone's workflow, but it also leaves a paper trail that all parties can reference as needed. At PostHog, we have a culture of writing things down — but this is because we prefer GitHub and Slack for communications, both of which lend themselves better to the written word. We also maintain an extensive, publicly accessible company handbook as part of our open-source DNA.

A lot of our discussions take place on GitHub to account for the team’s different time zones. This allows for more carefully thought out — rather than quickly spoken — ideas.

Invite essential people only

You've probably been in meetings where you wondered why you’re there. Due to our rapid growth — a team of 20 in a year — we unintentionally landed up in this area. This is one of the reasons James introduced Small Teams, to help everyone focus and feel like a small team again.

via GIPHY

If your meetings are turning into a crowd of listeners, set some hard rules on the number of attendees and if you want to dig deeper, think about who is accountable for the work being discussed and only invite them. Time spent 'showing face' could be better spent on more productive tasks.

Implement your team’s feedback

Regularly ask your team if their meeting process is working and whether they need support with their workload. While meetings might be the primary way managers get work done, Makers need more time and space to focus on their work and are not as productive in meetings.

It's essential to strike the right balance between moments of team communication vs. optimizing for individual productivity. At PostHog, a lot of feedback went into changing our work model to move to Small Teams with more focused meetings, and you can view the rest of our company policies in our handbook.

Practice what you preach

Building a positive and productive meeting culture must be modeled from the top. While many companies have different policies around meetings, things on the ground might be different. For example, a company could declare Tuesdays as meeting-free days and still have a manager set up a meeting during that protected time because their calendars are full. This erodes trust in the system and fosters resentment.

Part of our magic here at PostHog is that we practice what we preach. James and Tim, PostHog’s co-founders, publicly model a low internal meeting culture. This sets the tone for the rest of the company and leads to high trust in management. It also assures everyone that they’ll always have plenty of non-meeting time to get work done.

The best meeting policy for your startup

Your company’s needs may be different, but there are key foundations you can build your meeting policy on. Firstly, respect people’s time. If you can shorten meetings either through scheduling or by ending them early, do so. We have a hard stop on meetings!

Secondly, optimize for productivity, not presence. Instead of having people come to the meeting to discuss line items on the agenda, have them mull over those items beforehand to arrive prepared. At PostHog, we present our key metrics every Monday to the company, with goals front and center and no vanity metrics celebrated.

Thirdly, it starts from the top. Your company’s leadership has to set and stick to the rules around meetings at all times. This builds trust and ensures accountability. Lastly, feel free to iterate your meeting policy. Play around with different approaches to meetings to see what works, and poll your team regularly for feedback. It goes a long way toward building a more inclusive culture.

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Apr 19, 2021

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