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"
Small team membership
Each PM belongs to a small number of our small engineering teams, so that all teams have a strong sense that the PM is there to support them equally. This also ensures that the PM has the time to dive deep into issues that require it.
Here is a overview that shows which of our PMs currently works with which team:
Anna
Annika
Teams with no PM currently
- Data Warehouse
- Error Tracking
- Max AI
- Surveys (light support from Annika)
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).
The quarterly per-product planning typically highlight the biggest blind spots a team or product has (e.g. what metrics or parts of the product do we think have potential, but we don't have enough context yet). Teams are encouraged to include their "biggest unknown" as a research goal for the PM to own as part of their quarterly goals. Findings should be shared asynchronously via a GitHub PR in #product-internal, and in the growth reviews or team standups where applicable.
As the PM team, we are also pursuing a couple of side projects each quarter with the goal of leveling up how we do Product at PostHog.
In Q1 2025, those are:
Goal 1: Bring growth and product thinking into teams -> Raquel
Goal 2: Hire a new PM -> Annika, with support from Anna
- Update the superday task to make it more data analysis heavy
- Hire a third PM
- New PM is set up successfully with their first team
Goal 3: Identify benchmarks for metrics we should care about to make them more actionable -> Anna
- Define what per-product metrics we care about (e.g. activation, churn)
- Based on industry benchmarks, define what "good" looks like
- Define a standard how we track these metrics across products (e.g. for churn, do we want to use a rolling 3-month average?)
- Update Product Metrics with agreed-upon definitions