These are the principles for the behavior we care about.
You're the driver
We hire people that are really great at their jobs, and get out of their way. There are no deadlines, very minimal coordination and you won't have us breathing down your neck.
In return, we ask for extraordinarily high ownership. To succeed you need to be intrinsically motivated.
Great people at PostHog can take very high level direction, and ship quickly to find out as quickly as possible if our plans can survive contact with customers!
Being the driver means getting stuff done yourself. We've had non technical people create hardware products, coding in C++, we've got designers that will write Tailwind and React - rather than just create the file in Figma. Our salespeople answer technical questions without engineers as backup - and if they don't know the answer, they educate themselves more deeply for next time. We like people to go full stack instead to reduce the number of dependencies.
Make it public
We default to transparency with everything we work on. That means we make a lot of things public: our code, our handbook, our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, what our strategy is, and who we have raised money from.
Internally, a culture of transparency looks like managers telling you to raise feedback directly with the person it concerns instead of solving problems for you, it means changing teams around in public Slack channels, it means detailed financial information, live updates on fundraising and board slide access.
Being transparent externally helps us achieve our mission - we write about what we're working on so the world can take advantage of the lessons we're learning, and so they know how to work with us better. Knowing that thousands of people will read our handbook pages forces clearer thinking. And, for free, we can build trust in a way other vendors just choose not to.
Do more weird
So much about how we work is different.
Weirdness can just be the absurd lengths we are willing to go to. It can mean redesigning an already world-class website, for the 5th time. It can mean shipping literally every product that relates to customer data, with teams of just one to five people competing with $200bn+ companies, successfully.
We aren't weird for the sake of it. We want the company perfectly optimized for our strategy. We have small teams when very few others do, because we are going to build 50+ products. We post billboards of our founders' faces because no one else is brave enough thus it stands out. Even the little things - like having pricing on our pricing page!
Why not now?
Why not now? means getting things done proactively, today. You do not need consensus to do things – focus your energy on shipping what's most valuable for our customers and the company, then take ownership of making it happen, not on getting buy in from others. You certainly shouldn't wait until next quarter if your new idea makes more sense to work on that your previous goal.
We have learned the clearest lessons at PostHog by doing things, not from hypothesizing about them. If we're debating doing something, just trying it is the best way to learn. Doing more planning is rarely the right way to figure out if something will work, doing the thing is the answer by default here.
Sometimes this approach might mean you ship something that others don't agree with. You will need to be willing to throw away work sometimes, because the upside – not needing to get lots of approval to do stuff and being able to take more bets – means we all move so much faster that mistakes are a lot less costly.
Why not now? doesn't just mean shipping huge product features. It may mean diving into a small customer support issue quickly to delight them – this is one of the main reasons people recommend us to others.
Optimistic by default
We have a lot of control over our direction, and we've been very well served by shooting for the best case scenario every time we make a decision. You'll hear us say things like "play offense, not defense", "how do we 10x this", "how do we win in 10 years' time". Aiming for the best possible upside and sometimes missing is much better than never trying.
This is especially true when we think of new ideas - any big new thing can sound pretty silly at first, almost by definition. You'll hear PostHog war cries like "we haven't built our defining feature yet, maybe this". It never is, but that's exactly the point. What we've already done is less important than what we do next. If we make new ideas painful to share with others, they'll eventually stop coming.
At a simple level, we want to be surrounded by people that are enthusiastic, passionate and happy. PostHog is a group of people working together with a shared goal. A positive, encouraging atmosphere simply means everyone is going to have a lot more fun and will be able to stick around for the full adventure here.
Put more grandiosely, PostHog is wildly ambitious, and with that, a level of optimism is required. You cannot change the world without first believing you can change the world. People not believing is probably a bigger deal than people not being able to.