People & Ops Team

People & Ops

Team members

Mission

Our primary goal is to build and retain our world-class team. We will accomplish this by making PostHog the most transparent company in the world, and the best place for people to work. Once on board, our goal is to enable our team to:

1. Maximize their impact and performance
2. Grow personally and professionally
3. Have a strong sense of purpose and belonging

Objectives & key results

Q3 2023

• Objective:
  • Future proof PostHog's growth financially and operationally.
• Key Results:
  • Fill 5/7 reqs open at the beginning of the quarter, and have strong pipelines for the others
  • Register with tax authorities and begin collecting and remitting VAT and sales tax
  • Acquire new 409a and EMI valuations and begin granting options through LTSE
  • 100% of Small Team offsites are planned and booked via Brex Empower
  • Enable product-focused small teams to see monthly profit vs. cost reports
  • File for at least $150k in 2022 R&D tax credits
• Rationale:
  • As the company's revenue grows, making sure we are compliant with tax authorities will help us avoid penalties in the future
  • More real-time visibility into revenue and costs will motivate teams to aim for profitability
  • Keeping our hiring metrics flexible will account for changes in priorities throughout the quarter

Responsibilities

Our people team works across talent, people, operations, and culture. This is what we care about:

• Setting a very high bar for bringing people on board. We are always looking for the best people in their field, or people on their way to becoming exceptional at their jobs. This is so important to us, it's enshrined in our values.
• Supporting our team throughout the entire employee lifecycle - from making an offer, to onboarding and progression, time off, and eventually parting ways.
• We create light-touch initiatives, systems, and processes that allow PostHog to act fast and scale iteratively
• Building a diverse and inclusive culture with a strong sense of belonging is at the heart of everything we do.

We use the RACI model to manage the various areas of focus within the team:

• R = Responsible - directly responsible for completing something
• A = Accountable - has final authority over completing something
• C = Consulted - needs to be brought in before a decision is made
• I = Informed - needs to be told when a decision is made

Customer

Every PostHog team member, as well as current, future and past candidates.

Team 1-1s

On a monthly basis, Charles offers every team member a totally optional, informal check-in. The format isn’t strict, and we usually talk about how you are doing, what you think we could be doing better as a company, any particular worries/concerns you have, random cool ideas you just want to riff on, etc. Things that have come up in recent all hands or team surveys are usually topics we can go deep on as well.

These conversations are confidential by default - Charles doesn’t share their content with anyone else unless explicitly asked to.

Slack channels

• #team-people-and-ops - internally public, default for ops & people discussions
• #private-people-ops - internally confidential, for minority of issues, e.g. salaries, candidate offers

Tools

Here is a summary of some of the tools we've found most effective for getting the job done. You can read more about why we chose them here. Grace and/or Charles are top level admins for all of these, should you need access.

People Ops, Recruiting, and Payroll

• Ashby - our ATS for managing all recruitment (you can find their full documentation here.
• Gusto - platform for managing all permanent US employees, including contracts, healthcare and payroll.
  • We use Middesk to manage all our state registrations and filings on our behalf.
  • For managing our US 401(k) we use Pentegra, which requires a manual monthly reporting process.
    • We are currently migrating to Guideline, which will take effect on Feb 1st 2023.
• Deel - platform for managing all team members outside the US and UK (using their EOR service in certain countries).
• UK contracts are currently done manually in Google Drive, with payroll also being run manually - our accountants load up payments in Revolut for us to approve every month. All templates are stored in the Legal Docs [CONFIDENTIAL] shared Google Drive, in the Team folder.
• US contracts are also done manually in Google Drive.
• To avoid emailing PDFs back and forth forever, we use PandaDoc.
• PTO by Deel - Slack app for booking all types of time off.
• CharlieHR - used to store all team personal details, documents, and pay. We are in the process of migrating this to Deel HR.

Finance and Banking

Details can be found in company-internal repo here

Everything Else

• LTSE Equity is where we manage our cap table.
• For those pesky externalities, we use Embroker for all of our insurance coverage, including D&O, Cyber Liability, and Travel.
• A bit unusual for an operations team, we track everything in GitHub from maintaining this handbook to sprint planning. You can find the People & Ops project board here.