PostHog Handbook Library / Marketing

853 words. Estimated reading time: 4 min.

Positioning

PostHog makes your product self-driving. For the canonical frame everyone at PostHog uses – the self-driving story, the standard description, and the products / tools / context / context warehouse model – see Brand foundations.

This section is the product-marketing detail: the vocabulary we hold ourselves to, an opinionated playbook for each tool, and how we name and position what we ship.

The house position: PostHog makes _your_ product self-driving. Everything we write ladders up to that. Keep the customer's product as the subject: they get a product that improves itself; PostHog is how. Don't write "PostHog is self-driving software" in customer-facing copy. We do use the same capabilities on PostHog itself – that's a proof point, not the pitch.

The words we use

We've repositioned around self-driving. That only works if we all use the same words for the layers of what we offer – across marketing, content, and positioning. The four layers (products, tools, context, context warehouse) are defined in brand foundations.

Use these words

Avoid these

Examples

✅ Say: "Add the PostHog Slack product." / ❌ Not: "Add the PostHog Slack tool."

✅ Say: "Product analytics is one of our tools." / ❌ Not: "Product analytics is one of our products."

✅ Say: "Your events, replays, and logs are the context that feeds self-driving." / ❌ Not: "...the sources that feed self-driving."

The tool playbooks

A reference index to the per-tool pages. Each follows the same shape – unique belief, who it's for, elevator pitch and three messages, battle cards, common objections, and selling to enterprise – so you can scan them quickly. Pull from them freely, but they work best when remixed and pressure-tested in real conversations, not framed on a wall and cited religiously.

The context warehouse has its own page too, but treat it as the platform everything above is built on – the data warehouse plus modelling, pipelines, and exports – not as a co-equal tool in this list:

What this isn't

If something here feels off, doesn't match what the product team is actually building, or contradicts itself across pages — open a PR or flag it in #team-marketing.

How we name and position things

Naming at PostHog is deliberately messy. Usually an engineer builds something and names it; sometimes James or Tim get the positioning right up front, but more often design iterates the name afterwards (and adds it to the all-hands so everyone catches up), and we reinforce it from there. The upside is that design and "execs" aren't a blocker to shipping – and since we usually soft-launch, the downside is small.

Pick names users already recognize. By default, position something as what a _user_ is familiar with, not the most technically accurate description – we often name new tools after what the major competitors call themselves. Users get it faster, we grow more quickly, and it keeps us building the basics a tool needs before trying to innovate ahead of product-market fit.

Positioning is dynamic. It changes as tools mature – we might position something narrowly at first to get feedback from a specific segment, then broaden or refine it as we learn how it's used. Every new tool should still reinforce the core story: PostHog makes your product self-driving.

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/marketing/positioning

GitHub source: contents/handbook/marketing/positioning/index.md

Content hash: 6bfbac14edff5ffb