PostHog strategy overview
https://posthog.com/handbook/strategy/strategy
Mission Increase the number of successful products in the world
Long Term Vision (for 2023) Everyone building a product has a clear path to making it successful without losing control of their data
This means engineers can install PostHog and within a few hours, qualitative and quantitative data will be captured from their product, audience and any other data sources they have (playing nicely with data warehouses).
PostHog will surface this data at the right time to anyone involved in building the product (PMs, Engineers, Support) to make their own well-informed decisions and safely release changes, validate and realize the opportunities identified.
It will be a “no brainer” for anyone to use PostHog with any product they are building.
https://posthog.com/handbook/strategy/business-model
Business model PostHog is a for profit company that balances the need to improve the open source code of PostHog with the need to add source-available features in order to generate income. We will build an open core business model.
Why would you work on the Community Edition?
A concern could be that given our business model, we’d only work on paid features.
The reality is that paid features can increase our revenue, thus our ability to grow and hire more developers, who we will use on both versions of the product. When we work on the Community Edition, it increases the community size, which means we end up with more features, and thus a better product. This means we get yet more community growth and it also helps with revenue growth since the source-available product will also improve.
https://posthog.com/handbook/strategy/prioritization
How do we shift focus between priorities?
We want to move fast and make sure we’re always focused on building what pushes us towards our vision. However, we also recognize that rapidly changing course or excessively pivoting can lead to incomplete or ineffective features and be demotivating.
We’re always looking to make the right decisions for the long term. However, we don’t believe in planning too far ahead as we’re continuously gathering new context.
After we’ve made significant progress towards our current milestone we will build a clear understanding of what we need to focus on next and why, at the end of each sprint we’ll ask ourselves if we’re likely to achieve the goal of our current milestone in the coming sprint. If so, we’ll also start preparing the context we need to move on to our next focus in the following sprint.