What our team really thinks about working at PostHog

Jun 28, 2024

We want to build the most transparent company in the world – and the best place for people to work in general. To find out how we’re doing, we run bi-annual team surveys. And to be totally transparent, we’re publishing them here for anyone to see. This page will always feature the results of our more recent survey.

How we run our company survey

We ask 14 questions covering categories such as company, confidence, culture, and growth. 12 of the questions we ask require a response ranging from 1, meaning strongly disagree, to 5, meaning strongly agree.

These questions also have an optional text field for people to add comments. They're are listed in the Benchmarks section below.

We also ask two questions that are mandatory and have open text fields:

• What motivates you right now?
• If you were to leave PostHog, what would the reason be?

We run this survey using the Deel Pulse Surveys app in Slack. We used to run surveys quarterly, but we now do them every six months.

H1 2024 survey results

We had a 79% response rate, or 33 out of 42 eligible respondents, for our H1 2024 survey. Our previous survey, which covered Q4 2023, had a 74% response rate. We’ve since added 14 new team members and three have departed. Ideally we’d get a response rate of 90% or higher, though we did have a good cross-section of teams and tenures.

Highest scores

• 97% positive: I understand PostHog’s goals and can see how my work contributes to them.
• 97% positive: PostHog is in a position to really succeed over the next three years.
• 97% positive: My manager and team around me genuinely care about my wellbeing.

Lowest scores

• 82% positive: The support I am receiving and processes we have in place allow me to do my best possible work.
• 79% positive: I believe that my total compensation (salary + equity + benefits) is fair, relative to similar roles at other companies.
• 79% positive: I see myself still working at PostHog in two years' time. We don't use AI to summarize these results at our scale as we think it's worth a human reading and synthesizing this information properly.

Benchmarks

We took the scores we received and compared them to Culture Amp’s benchmark for ‘new tech’ companies with less than 200 people. We then took the average score out of 5 and multiplied it by 20 to get a percentage. It’s a bit rough, but is useful for comparing our scores against the industry benchmark. Here's how we compare.

Qualitative questions

What motivates you right now? The most common themes people highlighted this time were the same as last time.

• Team. People used phrases such as: the team, great colleagues, helping the team, the great folks at PostHog at all levels, and improving things for teammates.

• Growth. People used phrases such as: growing the company, seeing revenue going up, business growing, and numbers going in the right direction.

• Opportunities. People used phrases such as: many learning opportunities, ability to be heard and try new things, so many opportunities lie ahead of us, and building a great product.

If you were to leave PostHog, what would be the reason? There were a variety of answers to this question, all of them hypothetical, but all to be taken seriously.

• Career growth. People used phrases such as: start my own company, getting back into management, a better opportunity for my career, a career growth move, and starting my own startup.

• The work. People used phrases such as: not feeling like I'm making an impact, getting overwhelmed with non-fun work, stuck too long on challenging, repeating things, and burnout.

• Company stops growing. People used phrases such as: business growth stalling, growth stalling or the company failing, and the company isn't growing anymore.

Highlights from comments

These specific but anonymous quotes are broadly reflective of responses from multiple people. We’ve split them into two categories, positive and constructive, as they cover a wide range of topics.

Positive:

• Bouncing wacky ideas off of peeps, then building them at warp speed
• Everyone's motivation to grow and see the company succeed.
• Shipping a product people love and use
• I feel bad for people who don't get to work somewhere like PostHog
• I would say PostHog is a place where people who can work independently and without much process and support do best, but for me this 'light-touch' process works
• I really love the weekly context bomb at the all hands

Constructive:

• I think the lack of general process and over-engineered ownership that is typically a big plus has gotten in the way of some products actually making the strides forward that they could have.
• For the company as a whole, I think things are pretty good, but I do think that satisfaction is heavily dependent on the team you're on.
• Our setup means we are always on the edge of exhaustion because we purposefully keep things lean and tight on numbers.
• All ingredients are there, but growing pains are apparent specifically around team management.

What we’ll do next

Our executive team reads all the responses in full and has already gone through all the results. Charles is responsible for making sure we identify any actions that might be needed. Where action is needed, it is usually the relevant exec team member who follows up.

That said, not every comment needs a followup. The priority here is to collect information and get a sense of overall trends. The survey becomes a failure if it is used as the primary way for people to share feedback with PostHog, something which we encourage people to do through more transparent channels. This is partly why we only do it every six months.

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