New starter onboarding

Your first few weeks

Welcome to the PostHog Customer Success & Onboarding team! We only hire about 1 in 400 applicants, so you've done well to make it here! Unlike a lot of companies, we don't have a super-long onboarding process and would prefer you to be up and running with your customer base as quickly as possible. Here are the things you should focus on in your first few weeks at PostHog to help you achieve that.

Ramping up is mostly self serve - we won't sit you down in a room for training for 2 weeks. If you're not sure who is supposed to make something below happen, the person responsible is almost certainly you!

Also look at the sales team's onboarding page for guidance on what not to do when you start. In general, there's a lot of good resources within sales to reference (as we were previously one team!)

Day 1

• Meet with Dana who will run through this plan and answer any questions you may have. In addition, come equipped to talk about any nuances around how you prefer to work (e.g. schedules, family time etc.).
• Setup relevant Sales & CS Tools
• If you start on a Monday, join your first PostHog All Hands (at 4.30pm UK/8.30am PT) and be prepared to have a strong opinion on whether pineapple belongs on pizza.
• If you start on a Monday, join your first CS and Onboarding standup.
  • We fill in a GitHub issue every week before this meeting so we are prepared for the discussion topics. Dana will add your GitHub handle to the template.
• (Onboarding specialist) Book time with Magda / Cameron to go over the nuts and bolts of the role - which leads get onboarding, what signals we're looking for, how to reach out. Start working through leads together.

Rest of week 1

• Ask team members in your region to be invited to some customer calls so you can gain an understanding of how we work with customers.
• Check out some BuildBetter calls and add yourself to a bunch of Slack channels - get immersed in what our customers are saying.
  • There are a few BuildBetter playlists to start with – customer training calls, PostHog knowledge calls, onboarding specialist calls, add to them as you listen!
• Learn and practise a demo of PostHog.
• Read all of the CS & Onboarding section in the Handbook as well as the Sales section, and update it as you learn more.
• Meet with Charles, the exec responsible for CS and Onboarding.

Week 2

• Shadow more live calls and listen to more BuildBetter recordings.
• Explore Vitally and Metabase – take note of any questions you have to go through during in-person onboarding.
• Towards the end of the week, schedule a demo and feedback session with Dana. We might need to do a couple of iterations over the next few weeks as you take on board feedback, don't worry if that's the case!
• Get comfortable with the PostHog Docs around our main products.

CSM

• During your first week, Dana will figure out your initial book of business (around 30 accounts). We will review these at the start of your second week, and make sure you understand how your targets are set.
• Prioritize your current book of customers, and start reaching out! You should check conversations in Vitally to see if someone else has a prior relationship as they can make a warm intro for you.

Onboarding specialist

• Book time with Magda for a deep dive on PostHog billing, sales process/routing. This will help you understand how your role fits in the broader context of the CS and Onboarding team
• We'll start routing new leads to you at the end of week 1. Start to review these and reach out, using a shared booking link with someone else from your region so they can back you up in the first few weeks. This is a great option to practise and fail.

In-person onboarding

Ideally, this will happen in Week 3 or 4, and will be with a few existing team members (depending on where we do it) and will be 3-4 days covering:

• Demo practice session with the team.
• The data we track on customers in PostHog and some hands-on exercises to get you comfortable using PostHog itself.
• Deep dive on Vitally tracking.
• No stupid questions session.

Weeks 3-4

• Focus on taking more and more ownership on calls so that team members are just there as a safety net.
• Make sure all your tooling and automation are fully set up (health indicators etc.)
• (CSM) Continue to meet with your book of customers.
• (Onboarding specialist) Continue to meet with inbound leads - very quickly you should be doing these solo. The customers you are working with will mostly just be getting started, so you'll see a lot of very familiar patterns emerge.

How do I know if I'm on track?

CSM

By the end of month 1:

• Be starting to solve technical problems for your book with occasional help
• Be leading customer calls and demos on your own
• Successfully made contact with everyone in your book of business

By the end of month 2:

• Saved your first 'we're going to churn' - it's going to happen, but you're going to save them!
• Be leading evaluations on your own

By the end of month 3:

• Be independently working with your entire book to solve tricky technical problems with minimal assistant (CSM)
• On track to consistently hit your retention targets
• You've suggested and made changes to our systems that enable you to do your job better
• Think about customer health scores and add/change anything you learn here

Onboarding specialist

By the end of month 1:

• Be leading customer calls and demos on your own
• Converting leads from your book to 'onboarded' in Vitally. This means you've spoken with them (call, email, Slack) and have confirmation they will pay, or they have signed an annual contract.
• Passing off large contracts to AEs via Salesforce

By the end of month 2:

• You're a PostHog power user - most questions you raise can only be answered by product engineers rather than the support team

By the end of month 3:

• You've implemented process and system-level changes to make your job better/more effective

PostHog curriculum

PostHog has a lot of products! To help you figure out how to start and continue build your knowledge, here's a recommended list of topics to work through.

Add and modify this list as you work through it.

Fundamental

Product analytics

Quick primer on Product analytics

1. Creating insights: everything in Trends, Funnels, User paths
   • Retention, Stickiness, Lifecycle
   • How to filter out test users?
2. Persons
   • What are persons and how are they created?
   • Identify()
   • identified vs anonymous events
   • Pricing
3. Session replay – masking, cutting costs, filtering
4. Toolbar – heatmaps, actions
5. Groups – what is it? what is the use case? how is it charged?

Implementation

1. How is PostHog implemented?
2. Autocapture – how do you customize autocapture? How do you leverage autocapture?
3. What are custom events? How do you set custom properties?
4. What is identify? How do you set custom person properties? How do you merge users? What is alias?
5. What are groups? How do you set group properties?
6. Projects, Cross-domain tracking, reverse proxy, cookie consent (EU)

Intermediate

Feature flags

1. Creating and using them in code
   • How do I ensure flags are loaded before capturing any events?
   • Can you evaluate feature flags using properties that haven't been ingested yet?
2. Locally testing feature flags using toolbar
3. Insights based on feature flags:
   • Some users have access to a beta feature. How do I filter insights for these users?
4. Local evaluation
5. Client-side bootstrapping
6. Troubleshooting

Experiments

1. Creating an experiment from PostHog UI
2. Understanding MDE, primary metrics, secondary metrics, interpreting results
3. Traffic allocation - configuring it and validating it. What are some reasons why 80/20 split may not be an 80/20 split?
4. Returning users: user sees variant A in session 1, does not convert; user sees variant B in session 2, does convert
   • Does this happen? Can the same user see different variants in different sessions? If so, how does this affect the results?
5. No-code web experiments
   • Implementation requirements
   • Landing page experiments – how to deal with flickering of content when page is first loaded?

Others

1. Creating cohorts – static vs dynamic
2. RBAC, Teams add-on
3. Data pipelines

Advanced

1. SPA (single page apps)
2. User paths
   • wildcard groups
   • path cleaning rules
3. API