Technical support subject matter experts (SMEs)

Why we have SMEs

As we add more products to PostHog, it becomes increasingly difficult for individual support engineers to effectively work across every product. SMEs help us maintain deep expertise across our products and ensure every ticket gets answered by someone who really knows their stuff.

By allowing SMEs to own groups of PostHog products, we build the knowledge needed to delight users with better and faster answers, and develop close relationships with product teams so we can advocate for fixes and features that actually matter to users.

Product ownership

Product groups

The various PostHog products have been split into the following product groups:

• Analytics (analytics platform, customer analytics, product analytics, web analytics, growth)
• Unclassified (tickets in the 'Support' group)
• Flags (experiments, feature flags, surveys)
• Data (batch exports, data stack, ingestion, workflows)
• Replay (replay)
• Observability + AI & client libraries (error tracking, PostHog AI, LLM analytics, SDK/Implementation, mobile)

A note on these groupings: These product groups are based on current ticket volumes. As products grow or new ones launch, we'll split or reorganize them. This structure will evolve with our needs.

SME ownership

All technical support engineers, regardless of SME ownership, work on:

• Analytics products - work for this product group is shared as it represents the highest proportion of our tickets.
• Unclassified tickets - where possible, these tickets should be updated with the correct product group.

Beyond that, we have SMEs who own specific product groups. For each product group, we select one person from EU and one from NA to maintain timezone coverage:

Flags

• EU: Ben Lea, NA: Phillip Ramirez

Data

• EU: Luke Belton, NA: Kyle Swank

Replay

• EU: Christian Rafferty, NA: Ben Haynes

Observability + AI & client libraries

• EU: Christiaan Hendriksen, NA: Steven Shults

Analytics

• EU: Xander Jones

What SMEs actually do

Being an SME means you're the go-to person for your product group. This breaks down into three key aspects:

Own the customer perspective

• Maintain oversight of all tickets in your product group
• Spot patterns and common themes
• Understand what bugs are frustrating users most
• Know what features users are asking for

Partner with engineering teams

• Build good relationships with the engineering teams who own your products
• Consider attending their standups occasionally (you don't need to go to every one)
• Keep an eye on their Slack channels to know what's recently shipped and what's being worked on
• Understand what's on their roadmap
• Bring customer context to help with their quarterly planning - what bugs are most prominent, what features users want most

Improve support

• Look to improve the support experience within your product group
• Identify ways we can proactively help customers and prevent tickets (e.g. docs, in-app prompts, automatic checks)
• Look for ways to streamline support operations for your product group (i.e. identify most common investigation steps that could be surfaced onto tickets automatically)

How to work as an SME

Your Zendesk views

SMEs each have a dedicated view in Zendesk that includes:

• Tickets created from Slack channels
• Tickets submitted via the help sidebar
• Community questions

These views contain tickets from your specific product groups (see groupings above) and all shared product groups (analytics and unclassified tickets). If there are any unclassified tickets that appear in your view (tickets in the 'Support' group), then where possible please assign these to the correct product. Let Abigail Richardson know if there are certain types of tickets which regularly appear in the 'Support' group.

Important: These views show tickets assigned to other team members too, giving you full context of your products. Jump in if you know something off the top of your head or see someone stuck.

Your daily workflow

Start your day with your SME views. Build your knowledge. Get really good at your products. Once you're on top of your SME queue, move to the Technical support shared view which has all tickets the technical support team is responsible for.

But here's the key: you're not locked into only your SME products. The goal is expertise, not silos. If you're caught up and the shared queue needs attention, dive in. If you're swamped and someone else can help with your SME queue, ask for it.

Coverage and coordination

You and your SME counterpart in the other timezone should work together to:

• Share knowledge, patterns, and themes you're seeing in tickets
• Coordinate on holiday planning - can you stagger time off to maintain coverage?
• Call out when your SME queue is especially busy and you need help
• Communicate in #team-support about coverage gaps or when you need backup

As we grow, we'll need less manual coordination. For now, always consider coverage and communicate proactively.