Helping the company win helps you win
The best way to progress your career at PostHog is to understand your team’s and PostHog's objectives, then:
- Ship fast towards these
- Give and receive direct feedback to help yourself and others do the same
- Fix problems when you see them - early objectives are often wrong
You are what you do. Getting promoted in a company that is struggling, is very hard. However, if the company is succeeding, it'll be easy to justify, and to afford, pay rises where people are performing very well.
Give a shit about your work, your team, and our users
These three are the inputs that lead to the output of career progression. If you focus only on yourself, no value is provided and you won't progress. If you only focus on your team, you won't build the right thing for our users. Having a consistently caring attitude will in the long term lead to progression - if you do this, PostHog will progress you.
When we IPO, you will literally walk into any job anywhere
While being able to talk about all the cool stuff you built will help you in your future career, being an early employee that took us from very early to public is a huge and an exceptionally rare career achievement. That's how you leap multiple positions into an exec role, or whatever else you want to do.
Ways we help you progress
Hire and maintain a team of excellent people, all working transparently, that you can learn from
We are disciplined with maintaining a high bar. And since everyone works so transparently, you can learn from watching what everyone is doing - from how board meetings work, to why we picked a company strategy, down to why our frontend is the way it is.
Give you loads of autonomy
We don't limit you, and will push for much more than you may think is possible. It will feel hard, but rewarding. You will get used to not asking for approval.
Give you lots of interesting problems to work on
PostHog has a wide variety of challenges - from data, to entire new products and features, to design and UX tradeoffs. On the go-to-market side, we're wildly different - you'll learn about self serve, bottom up adoption, handling a community, and how giving things away for free leads to us making money.
We have small teams - we can move people around as we grow to provide variety and to let people switch up their focus if things get stale.
Lightweight management
You have someone to talk to, but without being micromanaged. Their priority is to support you, and we give them resources to make them a better manager. They will also do a regular career check-in with you as part of your 1-1s to ensure you're on the right track.
Build a huge open source portfolio
Better than a fancy title - you can show future employers or investors what you built and the problems you solved.
Your team around you see your everyday work more than a manager - get direct feedback from them
Great people + direct feedback = learning.
Ways we do not help you progress
A checklist of things / a formal career progression framework
This is self-interested by its nature, so creates the wrong incentives. The benefits of frameworks only start to outweigh their drawbacks when you need to start coordinating 100s of people.
Fancy titles
We don't have a wide range of titles - we want people to be as equal as possible in order to enable autonomy versus micromanagement. Your open source work speaks for itself.
Getting a manager to progress you
This gives too much power to managers. No one else can really do this for you - your motivation to progress has to be intrinsic to be sustainable.