New hire onboarding

Your first few weeks

Welcome to the PostHog's Onboarding team! We only hire about 1 in 400 applicants, so you've done well to make it here! Unlike a lot of companies, we don't have a super-long onboarding process and would prefer you to be up and running with your customer base as quickly as possible.

Here are the things you should focus on in your first few weeks at PostHog to help you achieve that.

Ramping up is mostly self-serve - we won't sit you down in a room for training for 2 weeks. If you're not sure who is supposed to make something below happen, the person responsible is almost certainly you!

Below is a rough plan for your first month - use it as a guide, not a contract. The handbook itself is a work in progress, so you'll find gaps as you ramp up, things you needed to know that weren't written down. That's normal, and when you find a gap, your job is to fill it in so the next person has it easier.

Day 1

• Familiarize yourself with how we work at PostHog.
• Meet with Magda, who will run through this plan and answer any questions you may have. In addition, come equipped to talk about any nuances around how you prefer to work (e.g., schedules, family time, etc.).
• Setup relevant tools and check out tools specific for the Onboarding team.
• If you start on a Monday, join your first PostHog All Hands (at 4.30 pm UK/8.30 am PT) and be prepared to have a strong opinion on whether pineapple belongs on pizza.
• If you start on a Monday, join your first Onboarding standup.
• We fill in a GitHub issue every week before this meeting, so we are prepared for the discussion topics. Magda will add your GitHub handle to the template.

Rest of week 1

This week is about getting set up and learning how we talk about PostHog. You'll feel extremely unproductive, and that's fine - the aim is to set yourself up for in-person onboarding. Read everything you can, work through the product fundamentals, and gather questions we can work through together.

• Confirm that you have been added as a member to the PostHog organization in GitHub. Fraser can add you if you haven't.
• Work your way through your onboarding checklist that a member of the should have created and sent a link to.
• Ask team members in your region to be invited to some customer calls so you can gain an understanding of how we work with customers.
• Check out some BuildBetter and Gong calls and add yourself to a bunch of Slack channels - get immersed in what our customers are saying.
• There are a few BuildBetter playlists to start with – customer training calls, PostHog knowledge calls, onboarding specialist calls, add to them as you listen!
• Learn and practice a demo of PostHog.
• For familiarization and self-led training, follow the product framework. You work through this with the HogFlix Demo 3000 project, which is already populated with data. Alternatively, you can create a new project in either the US or EU PostHog instances and hook it up to your own app or HogFlix instance.
• Read all of the Sales, CS & Onboarding section in the Handbook, and update it as you learn more.
• Explore Slack. We're public by default, so Slack is one of the richest resources you have.
• Meet with Ben Bradley, who's responsible for GTM teams.

Week 2

• Shadow more live calls and listen to more BuildBetter recordings. Check out our Onboarding folder, where you can also find sessions on productivity and workflows.
• Explore Vitally and Metabase – take note of any questions you have to go through during in-person onboarding.
• Try running through the onboarding exercise that Kaya designed to test your skills for working with customer accounts.
• Towards the end of the week, schedule a demo and feedback session with Magda. We might need to do a couple of iterations over the next few weeks as you take on board feedback, don't worry if that's the case!
• Get comfortable with the PostHog Docs around our main products.
• Learn how to think about each product. As you go through the fundamentals, for each product you're trying to be able to answer:
• The value add - why a customer would care
• How it's implemented and implementation quirks worth knowing
• Signs of poor implementation
• How it works alongside other PostHog products
• How to get value out of it
• What you can do with the MCP

In-person onboarding

Ideally, this will happen in Week 2-3, with the company of a few colleagues (depending on where we do it and who's around). It will be 3-4 days covering (among others):

• Demo practice session with the team.
• The data we track on customers in PostHog and some hands-on exercises to get you comfortable using PostHog itself.
• Deep dive on Vitally and Metabase, i.e., seeing how the systems we use come together day-to-day.
• Toolkit and internal processes.
• No stupid questions session.

Detailed training plan available in the new hire onboarding checklist. This is a checklist for the Manager, you don't have to read it beforehand.

• We'll start routing new leads to you at the end of week 2. Start to review these and reach out, using a shared booking link with someone else from your region so they can back you up in the first few weeks. This is a great option to practice and fail.

Weeks 3-4

This is when you start working with your customers. Reach out, take the first calls, pick up the questions that come in, and start figuring out what each customer needs from you. You'll learn more about the product as you go, but the main thing in these weeks is starting to be helpful to your customers.

• You're already reaching out to our customer base.
• Focus on taking more and more ownership on calls so that team members are just there as a safety net.
• Continue to meet with customers - very quickly, you should be doing these solo. The customers you are working with will mostly just be getting started, so you'll see a lot of very familiar patterns emerge.
• Evaluate implementations as you go - is the customer set up well, are they getting value? The foundation check and health check are the structured ways to do this.
• Set up a call with Daniel to get a "soft intro" to Vitally playbooks, segments, and our internal metrics. It's not a deep-dive - just getting familiar.
• Keep working on your product knowledge. You can find a couple of exercises here.

How do I know if I'm on track?

By the end of month 1:

• You continue learning from the received feedback.
• You have a good grasp of our internal processes and workflows.
• You lead customer calls on your own.
• You should consistently craft a minimum of 10 outreach messages per day, without compromising on quality, style, or accuracy.
• You don't let accounts fall through the cracks before their renewal.
• You pass well-qualified opportunities to Sales via the Onboarding referral segment.
• You shipped your first handbook PR. The point isn't the PR itself; it's that the handbook only stays useful if everyone adds to it. Not knowing something isn't a failing, but leaving it undocumented for the next person is.
• You're sharing with the team. You're posting wins, learnings, opportunities for feedback, and anything else valuable in our shared channels. You were hired because we think you can improve our team, so don't be afraid to share opinions and approaches.
• You've embraced PostHog's culture: You're the driver, you take initiative, prioritize your time well, and work independently.

By the end of month 2:

• You're a PostHog power user - most questions you raise can only be answered by product engineers rather than the support team.
• You should show steady growth in both call volume and outreach activity, with a minimum of 15 outreach emails sent per day.
• You fully participate in team discussions and contribute to team projects. You raise the bar.

By the end of month 3:

• You've implemented process and system-level changes to make your job better/more effective.
• You surface ideas contributing to the growth of the team.
• Customers are happy after interacting with you, and you meaningfully contribute to their success.

General expectations

Our customers are always central to our work. There’s time and space to work on fun projects, but that should never happen at the expense of our customers. Below are some non-exhaustive tips to help you stay on track during and after the probation period.

Core responsibilities

• Make sure you’re on top of our customer base in Vitally. Don’t let renewals fall through the cracks.
• It's not a race - quality over quantity, always. Spend time reviewing accounts, be accurate, and genuinely helpful in what you email to customers.
• Listen to customers and respond to their needs. It’s a conversation, not a monologue with a set agenda.
• Make sure your Calendly schedule stays available for customers. You’re the master of your own calendar, and we trust you, but be reasonable.
• Do the Sales handoff where appropriate and always provide context on the customer.
• Maintain the hygiene - follow the process in Vitally, add notes, or tasks when necessary. Remember that we share the workspace, so keep the order.
• You’re the driver, so take initiative. Keep in mind improvements, optimization, process, or content updates as you go. Don’t be afraid to voice your ideas.
• AI should never be a substitute for learning. Use it to increase efficiency, but don't follow it blindly.

Communication and ownership

• Make sure you read the Handbook page on Communication. Always answer pings, even if it’s just to say “I’ll look into it later”. Emoji reactions can be helpful to indicate that you acknowledged or completed the task.
• Read the Handbook page on Feedback) Share and ask for feedback, take it with grace. Remember that it should be kind and factual, not based on assumptions.
• Publish your Sprint planning update on time. It should be done on Monday at the latest, so that others have time to read it before the Sprint planning call.
• Be yourself and stay human. Don’t send AI-generated emails to customers.
• Set an autoresponder in your inbox whenever you take a longer time off, and direct your customers to onboarding@posthog.com so that we can pick up your conversations.
• Share your knowledge! Share what you learned, or found out - the whole team will benefit from it.
• Don’t be late for calls. It’s rude, the same as eating on them.
• Use the Time Off tool to communicate your absence in advance.
• Keep your promises. If you promised to follow up with a customer or colleague, or work on a project, do it.
• Stick to deadlines.

Staying up to date

Everything at PostHog changes really fast. That's how to keep up as a start:

• Follow #tell-posthog-anything and #demo-posthog-anything daily for general announcements.
• Follow #cs-sales-support channel daily - it's crucial for all folks in customer-facing roles.
• Stay on top of the #incidents channel to know what’s going on and be able to inform customers.
• From time to time, it’s worth taking a look at #sales, #customer-success, #team-new-business-sales, #team-product-led-sales to get inspired by new ideas that other customer-facing folks implement, and what’s going on in general
• #changelog channel to stay up to date with newly released products and features.
• #today-i-learnt set up by Daniel, great for sharing and learning new things.
• Attend All-hands calls, and if you skip them for any reason, catch up with the recording. It lets you stay on top of the new features we release and our direction.
• Set a Slack matcher for specific keywords (e.g, “onboarding referral” if you want to see leads we pass to Sales).
• Slack also has a cool AI Recap feature - it might be helpful, same as using Slackbot to find relevant conversations.
• Don’t let your product knowledge get stale - check docs, use the product.