Website & Docs Team

Website & Docs Team

Cory and Eli in Vegas

People

Recently shipped

Voting for new PostHog features now available

Our Webs & Docs team has pushed a number of big changes to the site as we continue to invest in our community tooling. This week, they've updated our public roadmap so that you can now vote on upcoming features!

Votes won't be the only thing we consider when planning our future projects, obviously. But we will be keeping a close eye on what features you want to see.

Plus, we've created a new WIP page so you can see when we do start work on new features. You can subscribe to projects there for updates, as well as requesting early access to private betas.

Handbook

Q3 2024 goals

Drive community engagement

Objective: Increase the number of people asking and answering questions in the community forums

  • Implement HogCoins and awards
  • Community onboarding
  • Off-topic forum engagement
  • Grow adoption of community bios

Community question resolution

Objective: Help users find instant answers to their questions

  • Deflect new questions by suggesting relevant articles or existing threads
  • Make community forums accessible in-product

Previous goals

Q2 2024 goals

Q2 2024 goals

Nail community

Objective: Make PostHog.com a destination for product engineers and PostHog customers

  • Community homepage
    • Make PostHog more personal
  • Incentives/gamification
    • Get points by answering questions and engagement, stickers for community achievements
    • Show question views, encourage author to mark questions as resolved
    • Better email notifications
    • Website notification system
  • Onboarding
    • Fill out your bio, introduce yourself in the forums, see what the team is working on/subscribe to your interests
  • Templates
    • Create a vibe where people want to contribute
    • HogQL queries, dashboard templates, etc
  • OAuth
    • Support a link between PostHog Cloud accounts and community accounts

Quality & performance

Objective: Make it easier to develop on PostHog.com, and make sure things still work under heavy traffic loads

  • Move to Strapi Cloud for reliability and performance
  • Improve build times (currently ~18min) - Done!
  • Work through backlog of website quality issues

Search & discoverability

Objective: Make it easier to find answers directly on PostHog.com (vs Google)

  • Show suggested questions/answers before submitting a new question
  • Better interface for browsing search results
Q1 2024 goals

Q1 2024 goals

Make the website better

  • Make some performance enhancements - technical SEO and making sure we have a good Lighthouse score
  • Improve build times (currently ~18min)
  • Better documentation of stuff we’re making, especially with Strapi
  • Ship unified auth
  • ~Ship the new merch store~
  • Get API docs up to the same standard as rest of the website (exact scope TBD)

Get community to product-market fit

  • Build the missing features for /posts
  • Make it less confusing and horrible to change things on the roadmap
  • Make it easier for teams to self-manage
  • James gets the wider community engaged with /posts and the roadmap and proves out our community model

Continue to rove across product as we’re able

  • Better unification between website elements and in-app (eg: pricing tables, etc)

Values

1. Don't follow the crowd

There are hundreds of Linear-style websites out there. We are intentionally not one of them. Becoming the inspiration never started by copying what already existed. It's better to be copied than to copy.

2. To do it right, we have to do it ourselves

Plenty of services exist to make building websites easier, but they're limited by someone else's creativity. No off-the-shelf solution solves 100% of every problem. In order for us to execute our vision to 100%, we need complete control of the entire experience.

3. Treat our website as a product

"Death by a thousand cuts, but a thousand tiny improvements add up"

Our website isn't a marketing site. It's our primary channel for sales, recruitment, and communicating our company culture and values. Since these are always evolving, we are constantly evolving how we communicate them.

4. Spark joy, and continually push back against mediocrity

Doing unique things that unexpectedly delight visitors will pay off dividends over adding more signup CTAs to a page. Building for the long-term pays dividends over optimizing for the short term boost in conversion rate.

5. Treat the root cause, not the symptom

Sometimes users (even internal users) don't typically think past the immediate challenge they're facing. Take the time to step back and decide if a bit more thought and effort can make things 10x better.

Responsibilities

  • Ensure PostHog.com is the best resource for learning how to use PostHog
  • Support small teams in meeting their goals by providing design and copywriting support
  • Hold the line on quality and consistency across all of PostHog's digital experiences

Output metrics

How we work

Our team works in weekly sprints. We run joint sprint planning sessions with the Marketing team, since we often have projects that overlap. You can find what we're working on in the company-internal repo (private).

Designs for website & docs typically start in Balsamiq wireframes, then progress into hi-fi designs in Figma. Read more about this process.

Blog artwork and marketing assets

Because of the volume of content we publish, blog artwork has its own dedicated Artwork project board managed by Lottie.

When authoring a blog post, add the Artwork project board so we can create visuals and make sure the post is listed on our content calendar with a publish date. Learn more about our process.

Providing feedback

When we share a design, we do our best to explain the type of feedback we're looking for. (Ex: Overall visual aesthetic, flow, if a design communicates to our developer-focused audience, etc.)

If a screenshot is posted directly to a Github issue, that's a great place for feedback. (If a comment already covers your feedback, we encourage the use of an emoji response over additional comments like "+1".)

Some of the design tools we use, like Balsamiq and Figma, both have built-in commenting, which is useful for prototypes with multiple pages. If we provide a link to a prototype in one of these tools, please leave a comment using the app's comment system. This helps us review and take action on comments later, and creates a single place for discussion around a particular topic.

Important: We prioritize feedback based on alignment with business goals. Everyone has feedback about design. (If feedback is more of a personal opinion than a business-related perspective, we’ll note it, but don't be offended if your feedback isn't specifically addressed!)

Slack channels