tl;dr:“Improving activation is one of the most impactful things a product engineer can do, but it’s also weirdly hard to define. People often call it your product’s "aha" moment – i.e. when a user experiences your product's value for the first time – but this is vague and subjective.” Ian explains what it is and how to nail it.
tl;dr:As I’ll reveal shortly, badly managed flags have caused huge outages, a mountain of tech debt and, on one infamous occasion, almost bankrupted a company. Typically, this happens because: (1) Complexity creates confusion. Embedded and interlinked flags create many potential states that can quickly become untestable and unpredictable. (2) Poor maintainability creates tech debt. Old “zombie” flags get reused in unintended ways, or negatively react with new changes. Ian shares how you can avoid these problems.
tl;dr:“Growth engineers discover and capture these gains through their unique way of thinking and working. Luckily, you don't need to go to growth engineer school to learn their secrets. It all starts by learning to think like they do – here's how.”
tl;dr:“Our solution is trust and feedback over process and letting product teams own the process from beginning to end. We can't tell you what technologies to use, or the perfect way to pick them, but this is how our company of ~60, remote and async people does it.”
tl;dr:Ian covers: (1) Doing support makes you a better engineer. (2) Why engineers do support at PostHog. (3) Creating a support process built for engineers. (4) How to scale engineers doing support.
tl;dr:“Everyone at PostHog “dogfoods” our product, including non-product teams like marketing and sales. This helps ship faster, intercept problems, stay motivated, deeply understand our product and develop empathy. But none of this happens by accident. It requires a strong, intentional culture of feedback, transparency, and simple, repeatable processes. This is how we do it.”
tl;dr:(1) You have an information bottleneck. (2) How to prepare for a user interview. (3) How to find the right users to talk to. (4) What to ask during user interviews. (5) Avoid these common mistakes. (6) What to do after an interview. (7) Talking to users doesn't stop at user interviews.
tl;dr:(1) How to prepare for a user interview. (2) How to find the right users to talk to. (3) What to ask during user interviews. (4) Mistakes to avoid. (5) What to do after an interview.
tl;dr:“There is a point in your product journey where what to build next goes from obvious to unclear. The options seem endless and choosing correctly can be the difference between a thriving product and a failing one.” Ian discusses how to navigate this.
tl;dr:Besides being difficult to pronounce, being asynchronous means people can work autonomously and on their own schedule, even if other teams members aren’t immediately available. This post shares PostHog's not-so-secret strategies for working asynchronously across 11 countries.