PostHog Handbook Library / Onboarding

1,680 words. Estimated reading time: 8 min.

Onboarding process and tracking

Auto TL;DR

At a Glance

This long page covers these main areas. The list is generated from the article headings, so it updates with every handbook rebuild.

  1. Principles
  2. Internal process
  3. Vitaly views
  4. Onboarding program logic and sequence
  5. Account analysis for outreach and meetings
  6. How this is organized in Vitally via Playbooks
  7. General playbooks
  8. Setting timestamps for each stage

The onboarding team operates a high volume, high velocity sales pipeline with all pay-as-you-go (or YC) accounts that are forecasted to spend > $500 and are not otherwise engaged by Sales/CSM. As such, Onboarding is a linear flow moving from initial outreach to confirming the product is configured properly, ending with customers who are happy paying multiple bills. We aim to keep engagements to ~8 weeks, or 2 full billing periods, but in practice, there is some spillover depending on responsiveness.

Principles

Our onboarding program was created to offer necessary help, increase the value our customers get from PostHog, and assist them in achieving their business goals.

The program is guided by a few key principles:

Internal process

Vitaly views

Daily view (link)

Sort your view by the “Next Renewal Date” column to reach out to users in a timely manner. Since our role is focused on proactively providing users with value and setting them up for success, we’ve found it’s best to contact them ~14 days before their bill renews. This gives them enough time to see our email, schedule a call, and implement potential improvements in their setup.

Keep an eye on “Onboarding Pipeline,” which indicates whether the account is New or Onboarding has been initiated.

In the view, you have other useful columns like OS Priority, OS Last Messaged, forecasted MRR, or who’s assigned to the account. All these help in prioritizing your work.

Maintaining good hygiene and attention to detail is key here. Keep labels up to date and make sure not to miss accounts that were recently added to the segment—they might appear at the top of the list among accounts you’ve already worked through.

Remember to add a short summary from meetings in a Note, and if you need to follow up at some point, create a Task with a due date.

Kanban view (link)

A supplementary view that’s great for getting a general overview of progress.

Onboarding program - logic and sequence

There are two paths for customers to progress through the onboarding process: those who engage with us in some way, and those who show little or no engagement.

User engagement is tracked behind the scenes with the time stamp in Vitally, thanks to which we can query relevant data.

For day-to-day operations, these are the statuses we use to track users in the Onboarding Pipeline property:

The last two are not numbered, as they happen "outside" of the regular pipeline.

Note: You may need to add this property to your views in Vitally. It's found under Custom Traits.

For higher-spend accounts ($500+), we have Check-in Onboarding Status property that's triggered between 15-21 day in the Onboarding Journey. It serves us as a visual helper and reminder to circle back to the account, see if our advice was followed, record a Loom video, or share some extra resources. It's a great opportunity to re-engage customers and show them some other PostHog's capabilities that they may not know about.

The complete Onboarding Journey looks as follows:

| Weeks | Actions | | -------- | -------- | | Week 1 | First outreach to a New Account| | Week 2 | | | Week 3 | Extra check-in for $500+ accounts| | Week 4 | | | Week 5 | 2nd outreach (automated) - all accounts| | Week 6 | | | Week 7 | | | Week 8 | Graduation (automated) - all accounts|

The last two stages of the Onboarding Journey are automated with Vitally playbooks. Second outreach prompts users to surface unanswered questions and book a session with us, and the Graduation email is a nice way to conclude the journey and point out other avenues where users can get help. It's also where we ask for feedback about our Onboarding.

Account analysis for outreach and meetings

How this is organized in Vitally via Playbooks

General playbooks
Setting timestamps for each stage
Automations
Other

Segments

Going forward, we only have one main segment: Onboarding Lead. We'll be retiring Onboarding - engaged as soon as we have worked through all the legacy accounts.

We also use the Onboarding Lead 100-500MRR auxiliary segment to provide us with more information about the account and help us prioritize the work.

Onboarding Completed segment corresponds with 3.Onboarded trait and it serves as a visual indicator for other teams that the Onboarding has been completed.

Alerts and revenue tracking

We occasionally shift our attention to help customers who may need more urgent assistance. For these, we have a few types of alerts (tasks) in Vitally, where Magda is a failsafe if the account doesn't have an assigned OS.

To help our Revenue team get the forecasting right, we now have a Payment Risk Assessment field in the Vitally dashboard, where we can manually mark when we see that the customer is unlikely to pay their invoice.

Specific cases

How to stop automation

There might be some specific situations where you're actively engaged with the customer, and you don't want the email automation to fire off (e.g., the second outreach). You can easily spot when the email automation is scheduled by checking "Onboarding Pipeline Stage Times" widget in the Vitally dashboard.

To stop the automation, you can flip the account to the Onboarding Completed status. This change will block the second outreach, but will still fire the graduation email.

Failed payments

We may get a Failed Payment alert on a customer we still haven't engaged with. In this case, since we're unsure whether the customer is going to stay with us, we don't have to do a deep account analysis. It's enough to remind them to settle the invoice, offer help, and briefly point out obvious spikes and main drivers of the bill.

It's enough to reach out just once, as the finance team monitors the payments and handles the account deactivation.

Currently, we exclude some subject line keywords, like "payment", "outstanding", and "fail" in the "Set onboarding initiated" playbook in order to avoid the status change from New Account to Onboarding initiated. In other words, when you reach out regarding a failed payment, the account should stay as New Account and resurface in Vitally's queue before the next renewal, if the customer settles the payment. When that happens, do our regular outreach with a deep account analysis and enroll them in the program.

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/onboarding/onboarding-tracking

GitHub source: contents/handbook/onboarding/onboarding-tracking.md

Content hash: 5611969f57bb6688

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