Developer Storyteller

Owner: Ian Vanagas (support from Vincent Ge and Edwin Lim)

Motivation: Data warehouse is a high-leverage product for our customer infrastructure strategy, but it lacks both high-quality docs and strong content marketing content to drive adoption.

What we'll ship:

• Updated and fully fleshed out docs, working along similar lines to reference docs Edwin and Vincent are creating for error tracking.
• Alternatives, comparison and top-of-funnel content promoting our data warehouse.
• Opinionated blog and newsletter content (e.g. how we use data warehouse)

We'll know we're successful when

• Top-of-funnel content is getting traction and creating interest
• Interest in the product converts to real usage from new and existing users
• Growth in pageviews to data warehouse docs and tutorials
• Increased visibility of PostHog as a data warehouse option from LLMs

Owner: Lior Neu-ner

Motivation: We want to reduce reliance on Substack recommendations, improve quality of paid signups, and create a scalable growth engine that's (largely) set and forget.

What we'll ship:

• Newsletter ads for LinkedIn, Meta, and Reddit.
• Newsletter ads and placements using new methods of tracking to validate.

We'll know we're successful when

• Open rates above 40%
• We know what works and this becomes easy to maintain

Owner: Ian Vanagas, Lior Neu-ner, and Andy Vandervell

Motivation: We want to maintain our existing newsletter schedule and quality standards while developing a stronger opinion on the future of newsletters at PostHog, audiences we want to reach, and what we're going to do to reach them in the short, medium and long-term.

What we'll ship:

• An awesome newsletter every two weeks
• Newsletter offsite to workshop new ideas and long-term plans
• Updated handbook pages on newsletter process + plans
• Hiring plan for what's needed to execute our newsletter vision

We'll know we're successful when

• We're excited about our long-term plans for the newsletter
• We ship a great newsletter every two weeks
• We continue to see good engagement and feedback on newsletters
• No decline in important metrics (shares, organic subs, open rate etc.)
• We successfully onboard a new newsletter writer in Q3 with clear goals to work on

Owner: Andy Vandervell

Motivation: We want to completely own the concept of the Product Engineer by creating its central text. We're 80% of the way there. Need to ship final 20%.

What we'll ship

• The introductory chapters of the handbook using a similar structure to the company handbook. This will give us the platform to then develop more sections on specific topics, or potentially integrate getting started content into the handbook.

We'll know we're successful when

• We've shipped the first version of the guide
• Positive initial reaction from our users and readers
• Ranking for product engineer keywords in search
• Incoming users convert to reading other parts of guide
• Converting handbook readers to subscribers of the newsletter

Owner: Vincent Ge and Edwin Lim (support from Ian Vanagas)

Motivation: We want to show what 10x docs should look like by setting an example with a single product. These conventions will become examples and templates for 10x-ing other docs and a model for future technical writers to follow.

What we'll ship:

• End-to-end product docs which include overview, concept explainers, references, use-case guides, tutorials, best practices, troubleshooting, code examples.
• Stretch goal: Example app for error tracking

We'll know we're successful when:

• Other small teams want their docs to look like the error tracking docs :)
• Praise from users how awesome error tracking docs are

Owner: Vincent Ge

Motivation: No one should guess or look at source code to know how SDK methods work. We need to auto-generate references from source code that are accurate and always up to date.

What we'll ship

• Reference generation code for:
  • posthog-js
  • posthog-react-native
  • posthog-node
  • posthog (python)
  • We can ship more or less depending on schedule/ask
  • We want push for highly accurate coverage and accuracy for these
• posthog.com page that reads references and displays reference docs for:
  • Exposed methods
  • Parameter input and return type output
  • Type definitions

We'll know we're successful when

• We gravitate toward checking SDK references as a source of truth for SDK signatures.
• No more huge, hand-written SDK docs pages
• 0 undocumented methods and type definitions for listed SDKs

Owner: Edwin Lim

Motivation: At PostHog, everybody writes documentation. So let's equip everyone with the templates, tools, and criteria to 10x their output alongside ours.

What we'll ship

• An updated docs handbook with templates, tools, and style guide criteria for writing PostHog documentation
• A set of LLM prompts to help quickly generate templates

We'll know we're successful when

• Teams actively use the templates and tools to write new docs
• Positive feedback from teams that resources make it easier for them to ship docs

Owner: Alex van Leeuwen

Motivation: We have a series of ongoing video projects that are high-value and big lifts

What we'll ship

• DeskHog launch video
• Customer infrastructure vision / explainer ;)
• Hackathon documentary with accompanying blog post

We'll know we're successful when

• They are shipped on time (within reason)
• Positive feedback from PostHog fans

Owner: Edwin Lim (with support from video)

Motivation: Video (HogTok) as a website delivery system for feature discovery, tutorials, and technical content, and our flagship big video projects.

What we'll ship

• Two HogTok's per week consistently
• Social media player that supports videos and images in the app and website
• Social posts on brand and James' account using HogToks

We'll know we're successful when

• Users watch the content
• People mention how cool HogTok is
• Support and sales teams find it useful enough to share with users
• We can see conversion to usage / adoption of features

Owner: Andy Vandervell

Motivation: We need to grow our team to increase our capacity for core work and grow our owned audiences

What we'll ship:

• Hire all Q3 roles in the marketing hiring place:
  • 1x post-production specialist
  • 1x content marketer
  • 1x developer who writes guides
  • 1x Developer who writes newsletters
• Proposals for new roles as needed, including:
  • Developer who is terminally online (social media)

We'll know we're successful when

• We've hired everyone want during Q3
• New starters onboarded and making an instant positive impact

Owner: Andy Vandervell

Motivation: We want a better grasp of data and growth patterns for our work, and we (mostly Andy, tbh) thinks more robust systems will help us coordinate content and marketing efforts better as we scale.

What we'll ship

• Insight of the week during sprint meetings
• Kick-ass new dashboards for how content and docs are performing
• Monthly growth review for team content (inc. newsletter, content & docs)
• Marketing / content calendar anyone can access and understand

We'll know we're successful when

• We're regularly making better decisions about what to prioritize based on data
• We have a strong grasp of the data points we care about (and which ones we don't)
• Anyone can see what's happening and when at a glance

• Plan for dealing with stalke tutorials and content – Lior
• Testing viral animated video shorts – Lior
• Automating summaries of the docs feedback each week with LLMs to make it actionable – Vincent
• Adding Greptile or similar to website repo to spot common errors and problems – Ian

• Much better docs + content marketing for CDP, surveys, and LLM observability
• Doubling down on SEO content (i.e. alternatives, comparisons, etc. for all products)
• Consistent video schedule for things like changelog, new features etc. outside of big projects

• Nailing YouTube. This is long-term ambition, but we're not ready to tackle this yet.
• Weekly newsletter. We've been down this road several times. Requires more resources.
• Redesigning docs website. We have thoughts here, but we can't ship this alone and there are more hair on fire problems for us to solve.
• Great docs homepage experience. We think this could be critical to communicating the customer infrastructure experience, but we have more fundamental problems to solve right now, and it isn't something we can ship alone. This is something we'll revisit as a potential Q4 goal / project.
• In-depth docs for Max AI. Some improvement here would be nice and useful, but the product is moving too fast for us to usefully contribute and we think users will gain more from playing with Max AI than reading docs. We do, however, want to use HogToks to encourage and inspire users to try using Max and explore things you can do using AI in PostHog.
• Owning unanswered questions on Docs. We don't have the capacity to do this and it would distract us from core goals. Will discuss better logic on docs pages for stale questions, or potentially out of date questions, with website folks.