These are the principles for the behavior we care about.
1. We are open source
Building a huge community around a free-for-life product is key to PostHog's strategy.
We default to transparency with everything we work on. That means we make a lot of things public: our handbook, our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, what our strategy is, and who we have raised money from. Internally, we go even further – providing financial information, live updates on fundraising, and board slide access.
This enables the strongest community growth possible. It causes the core team to raise the bar on their work, it provides the context needed for people to work across multiple timezones, and it enables a deep work-heavy and meeting-light culture. It creates trust.
2. We haven't built our defining feature yet
Ideas are fragile. Be direct but encouraging when you encounter new ideas. If we default to providing negative criticism of new ideas, then they'll simply stop coming. Instead, default to "yes and" rather than "no, but", before rejecting an idea.
We should never stop iterating. You learn faster and help PostHog perform better by getting what you're working on into the real world. We expect you to ship new designs, features, or whatever is needed for your role in tiny chunks, frequently, and often before you feel ready.
3. Everyone codes
... although this doesn't mean everyone has to be a software developer, and not everyone needs experience in this before they join. Our platform's adoption starts with developers using our open-source project, so we use GitHub to share most of our work publicly and to build a large community of technical users.
No matter your role, being able to use the basics of GitHub helps you understand our audience. Beyond that, we'll encourage you to build your technical skill, rather than delegating more challenging tasks to others, so you become a more effective contributor.
4. Trust and feedback over process
There are two ways to scale – trust and feedback, or process. We choose the former because we're building a wide platform with many products, so autonomy is more important than control. We hire people that work well with high level direction and will step on toes if needed to get things done.
When giving or receiving feedback, we assume positive intentions and focus on giving specific examples. Many of our team's peak experiences at PostHog have been receiving direct feedback. Feedback should be acknowledged, but what you do with it is up to you - no one built anything great by committee.
We expect you to pick out the very most important thing you can think of and work on that. Discard plans as you see fit.
We judge your performance based on the impact you deliver overall, no matter what your role.
5. Bias for impact
Proactive people are the most successful at PostHog. Prioritize hard and make sure you focus your energy on what's most valuable for our customers and the company, then take ownership of making it happen.
Today, across many product areas, we deliver the most impact when we move fast and maintain a high bar for quality. It improves retention and accelerates word-of-mouth growth.
In engineering, this means that bias for impact is likely to involve putting more effort into prioritization, scoping out the problem, and designing before implementation. It doesn't mean we aim to spend weeks in slow feedback loops. Instead, we get together and focus all our energy on rapidly understanding the problem and solution upfront.
Solving a small customer support issue quickly to delight them is also highly impactful since we know this is a strong contributor to our word-of-mouth growth.
For other areas of PostHog, this is likely to involve prioritizing and focusing our efforts on bigger bets which we believe can have an outsized impact (e.g. increasing sign-ups, getting a new large enterprise to start paying, increasing our rank on Google, etc.)
6. Talent compounds
Getting into PostHog is a huge challenge. Once you're here, it stays that way. We are extremely demanding of performance.
In return, you get to work with others producing the best work of their careers.
We are a team, not a family. This means we have very ambitious goals, compensate generously and transparently, offer exceptional benefits, and do everything we can to provide an environment for you to do your best work.
Often this means everyone, especially managers, getting out of your way. It's also not okay to let your teammates fail. We expect everyone to provide direct feedback to help everyone perform at their best. We pay generous severance if things aren't working out.