Product Manager (ex-founder or ex-product engineer)

Help us to increase the number of successful products in the world!

• 🌍 Location: We are full-remote and globally distributed! Our current team is distributed between GMT-8 and GMT+2 so we currently only hire in these timezones.

• 🎤 Interview process: Read more about our interview process.

• 🖥️ Team: all product engineering teams

• 💼 Manager:  Raquel Smith

• 💰 Compensation: Please check our compensation calculator.

• 🦔 Read more about how we hire and how we think about Diversity & Inclusion.

About PostHog

PostHog's mission is to equip every developer to build successful products.

Explain please

Equip - give developers all the tools they need in one to make their product a success. Today that means 8 products - web analytics, product analytics, session recording, feature flags, A/B testing, in app user surveys, data pipelines, and a data warehouse (to join customers' product data with other sources)… and there’s plenty more to come. We want to help developers fight through the mess of lots of different tools, integrations, vendors and roles inside their organizations - all of which distance take them away from their users.

Every - we don't target just big companies. Nearly all our growth comes from individual developers recommending us. We have big free tiers on all our tools so people without a budget can still use our products. The more we give away for free, the more money we make - because when a lot of people talk about your product on the internet, people in bigger companies end up using it.

Developer - we focus on helping the people writing the actual code. You'll be working with technical users.

Interesting backstory

PostHog was created as an open-source project during Y Combinator's W20 cohort. We've grown from a launch that is about as good as it gets on Hacker News, to 70,000 customers, quadrupling our revenue last year (whilst adding just 3 people!) and growing with a 2.8-day CAC payback period because we don't do outbound. We grow through word-of-mouth growth and a dash of content marketing.

In the future, we'll build 30+ products, all based on customer data, each across markets worth $1bn to $85bn. We're going to bring all these products to developers, at a lower cost and consolidated for a better experience.

Product at PostHog

Product management plays a slightly different role at PostHog than at most other companies and is incredibly important. Instead of micro-managing engineers, PMs are responsible for research, data, and setting high-level context across the organization. They work across multiple products to determine how products are being used, what the competitive landscape is like, and how users are feeling about PostHog.

Among other things, they:

1. Run growth reviews for products that have product-market-fit

2. Dive into data research projects to answer challenging questions without obvious answers

3. Organize user interviews

4. Provide just-in-time product feedback for new and existing features, following our principles of shipping and iterating quickly

5. Coach product engineers on "how to do product"

If you want to know more about our philosophy of building products, read our article “Product Management is broken. Engineers can fix it.”

What you will be doing:

You will be joining PostHog as a Product Manager, working with one of our engineering teams (with the potential to cover more than one team/product after your onboarding period), with a heavy emphasis on analyzing data, talking to users and owning the commercial aspects of your product(s):

• We have a growth review with every product every month. This involves the team lead, the team’s product manager, and the exec responsible for the team. As the PM, you ensure we have the right metrics, dig into things that have changed, understand what users are doing, why they're churning, etc. We use this session to figure out if we need to dig deeper into a trend or reprioritize what we're building.

• Across our eight products (and counting!), we have thousands of paying customers and many more on the free tier. That’s a lot of users and a lot of data. Finding actionable patterns in this data is one of the key ingredients to reaching $100M ARR. Example questions you might be answering:

  • How does revenue/usage churn for your product compare across different segments?

  • Which behaviours lead to long-term retention for your product?

• You keep an eye on the commercial side of things. Each of our products is competing with incumbents multiple times bigger both in revenue and employee size. You will lead the research into our competitors and the tooling landscape, and provide recommendations where we have the biggest untapped potential, whether it’s pricing, feature parity or even spinning out an adjacent product

• Things you choose to pick up. This could be a data deep dive outside the scope of the repeating growth reviews. Or figuring out how to package and price a new product that we want to perform better in terms of usage or revenue. Or it could be rubber-ducking the engineers to help them figure out the UX for a new product concept. This is a highly autonomous role, and you’re expected to figure out where it makes the most sense to spend your time.

There are things you definitely won't be doing:

❌ Backlog grooming (it always sounded gross anyway)

❌ Deciding or approving what we build (though you’ll help surface the context needed to make good decisions)

❌ Shielding developers from users (instead, you should aim to invite an engineer for every user interview you do)

❌ Project management / writing gazillions of tickets, RFCs, or PRDs

❌ Coding and shipping new features yourself (small PRs and hackathon contributions are of course encouraged)

From you

Must-haves: 

• Previous experience as a technical founder or product engineer in a startup: We are explicitly looking for someone who has written code before and now wants to focus on the product and commercial side

• Strong product sense: You can identify a product’s biggest selling points and weaknesses (both user experience and commercial) and turn them into actionable insights that inform your team’s product decisions

• Familiarity with business and product metrics (e.g. activation, retention, churn) and defining and tracking key product metrics

• Very proactive/organized: You don’t wait to be told what to do. Instead, you figure out what needs to happen, make it happen and keep multiple threads moving forward without letting things slip

• Collaborative: You default to transparency, share early, and seek feedback from the team and customers in an async-first world

Nice-to-haves (We don’t expect you to tick all of these boxes, but 1-2 are a big plus): 

• Additional product management experience (e.g. interviewing users or working with designers and engineers on new user experiences)

• Experience writing SQL for data analysis or any additional data modeling or querying expertise

• Experience working with the “modern data stack” (e.g. BI, visualisations, dbt, data pipelines)

Day to day vibe

We are open source - building a huge community around a free-for-life product is key to PostHog's strategy.

We aim to become the most transparent company, ever. In order to enable teams to make great decisions, we share as much information as we can. In our public handbook everyone can read about our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, what our strategy is, and who we have raised money from. We also have regular team-wide feedback sessions, where we share honest feedback with each other.

Working autonomously and maximizing impact - we don’t tell anyone what to do. Everyone chooses what to work on next based on what is going to have the biggest impact on our customers.

Solve big problems -we haven't built our defining feature yet. We are all about acting fast, innovating, and iterating.

PostHog is all remote and autonomous. We're not against in person work, but we are against in person work by default - we give you a bunch of budget if you want to travel around to spend time with colleagues or customers.

Do it

If this sounds like what you’d love to be doing, we can’t wait to hear from you. If you’re not sure that you exactly fit the above criteria, get in touch anyway. Alignment with our values is just as important as experience!

Benefits

What we offer in return:

• 💰 Generous, transparent compensation and employee-friendly equity in PostHog

• 🌴Unlimited, permissionless holiday with a 25-day minimum requirement - the team used 31 days on average in 2022

• 🏥 Private medical insurance, including dental and vision (US and UK only)

• 👵 👴 Pension/401k contributions (4% matching for US/UK)

• 🍼 Generous parental, bereavement and child loss leave

• 📕 Training budget and free books

• ☕ $300/month towards coworking (or a WeWork membership) and $1,500/quarter for meetups

• 🧠 Spill mental health chat

• 🤝 $100/month budget to provide support to open-source projects

• 💸 We'll be your first investor

• 🛫 Regular team off-sites (we went to Iceland in March) with carbon offsetting for work travel with Project Wren

We believe people from diverse backgrounds, with different identities and experiences, make our product and our company better. That’s why we dedicated a page in our handbook to diversity and inclusion. No matter your background, we'd love to hear from you!

Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you - we're happy to accommodate!
#LI-DNI