Design hiring at PostHog
Our Design team is small and we don't hire into this team very often. Please check our careers page for our open roles.
What we are looking for in Design hires
Beyond the specific skills listed in the job description, we always generally look for:
- Strong eye for design
- Experience working with Figma
- Ability to ship iteratively
- Communication skills
- Do they have writing errors in their cover letter? What does their online presence look like?
- Moreso than other companies, all of our communication is written and public for the world to see. Good written communication is key.
Design hiring process
1. Culture interview
The culture interview usually lasts around 30 minutes and will be with someone from our People and Culture team. This round is loosely structured into 4 different sections:
- PostHog - mission, vision, team, way of working etc. If it was cold outreach, we provide a little more context up front first.
- Candidate background and mindset.
- Talk about the hiring process and check if the candidate has seen our compensation calculator so we know we're roughly aligned.
- Answer any questions they have.
We are looking for proactivity, directness, good communication skills, an awareness of the impact of the candidate's work, and evidence of iteration or a growth mindset.
2. Technical interview and portfolio review
The technical interview round is a 2-part interview, lasting up to 90 minutes in total.
The first half of the interview will be with Cory and 1-2 team members, and it will focus on your Product and Design thinking. You can expect questions around your typical design process and how you prioritize.
The second part of the interview will be a portfolio interview, where you will meet a few other members of the team. You will present a deep dive into your portfolio, covering the end-to-end process from strategy to design to impact.
3. Design SuperDay
The final stage of our interview process is the PostHog SuperDay. This is a paid full day of work with us, which we can flexibly arrange around your schedule.
We will share the task with you at the start of the day. The task is representative of the work someone in this role at PostHog is doing, and it is always the same for each candidate, so we can make clear comparisons.
As part of the SuperDay, you will probably work directly on either our App, or the Website. We design our tasks to be too much work for one person to complete in a day, in order to get a sense of your ability to prioritize.
This gives you the chance to learn how we work, and for us to see your quality and speed of work, as well as the way you communicate. It is a very demanding day of work, but we want you to succeed!
A Design SuperDay usually looks like this (there is a degree of flexibility due to time zone differences):
- Kick-off session with Cory(Lead Designer)
- Meet the founders - Tim and James
- Time to focus on the task, we can provide support via your personal Slack channel
- Informal session with a team member
- On days where we have company wide meetings, we will invite you along to that and give you a chance to introduce yourself. On days without company-wide meetings, we will arrange for you to meet a few members of our team for a casual lunch/coffee break
Overall, you should spend at least 80% of your time and energy on the task and less than 20% on meeting people, as we will base our decision on your output of the day. However, we encourage everyone to use the Slack channel as much as needed for any questions or problems.
In line with our values and culture, you might get short replies like "step on toes" or "bias for action".
You can expect to hear back from us within 2 working days of your SuperDay. We will also make the payment for your SuperDay as soon as possible.
If we decide to make you an offer, we will arrange a call to discuss feedback and next steps, followed by an offer in writing.
In the case where we don’t make an offer, we will give you as much constructive feedback as possible.