PostHog has a product-minded engineering organization. Engineers own sprint planning and spec'ing out solutions. Read more on the role of the Product Team in this blog post.
So, what is the role of product managers at PostHog? PMs set context across multiple products for how products are being used, what the competitive landscape is like, what users are feeling about PostHog, and how they're using things.
Among other things, they
- run growth reviews for products that have product-market-fit
- organize user interviews
- coach product engineers on "how to do product"
PMs belong to up to two small teams, so both teams have a strong sense that the PM is there to support them equally. This limit also ensures that the PM has the time to dive deep into issues that require it.
Check the small teams page to see which PM currently works with which team.
Product goals
Product managers primarily support their teams in reaching their goals. The top two priorities of each PM are to run a growth review at the beginning of every month for each of their products, and to organise regular user interviews. (Our rule of thumb is 1 interview per week per PM).
As the PM team, we are pursuing a couple of side projects each quarter with the goal of leveling up how we do Product at PostHog.
In Q4 2024, those are:
Goal 1: Improve how we coach product engineers "how to do product" -> Anna & Annika
- Make sure the handbook is up to date for how to collect user feedback (surveys, interviews)
- Make sure the handbook is up to date for how we do product at PostHog
- Good structure for the “how to do product as an engineer” onboarding sessions, iterated based on feedback
- More engineers are confident to do user interviews on their own
Goal 2: More teams have a PM -> Annika
- Polish the hiring process (interview questions, superday)
- Hire a third PM
- New PM is set up successfully with their first team
- Anna is set up successfully with one more team
Goal 3: Improve product tooling -> Anna
- Come up with a better way to organise user interview notes
- Move all remaining dashboards to PostHog from Metabase (only do this if data warehouse provides 90% of the missing features we need)