Experimentation Team

People

• @EDsCODE (Team lead)
• @liyiy (Engineer)
• @neilkakkar (Engineer)

Mission

Makers everywhere get better at building products because of PostHog

Q4 2022 Goals

Objective: Make feature flags incredible to use for customers with 3-15 engineers (currently we have 10 customers with 3+ engineers who have created a feature flag in the last 30 days)

• Key Result: Launch remaining major platforms (with large marketing support to further drive adoption)
  • iOS
  • Android
  • Flutter
• Key Result: 5 happy teams on permission and alerting features
  • alerting/notification hooks to slack
  • access control
  • prevent accidental rollouts - 100% rollout should be loud and clear
• Key Result: 5 happy teams using feature flags based on cohorts
  • bulk add emails to cohorts
  • view cohorts by organization
  • edit static cohorts
  • cohort creation improvement, flexible user additions
  • cohorts by groups
• Key Result: Release beta of developer integrated features with 5 users
  • connect codebase and show feature flag coverage by branch
  • reorient feature flag page to show flags that are active AND implemented
  • Opportunity: Allow debugging integrations to be added and do issue tracking related to possible active feature flags
  • (stretch goal) CI implementation that allows people to check flags in code deployment against what's active + exists

• Rationale:
  • We want feature flags to be used across larger engineering teams. Currently we aren't solving their needs fully but we have a clear path to doing so.

Objective: Launch Direct SQL Querying Beta

• Key Result:

  • Five beta users who retain for three weeks

• Key Result:

  • Understand the possible product directions to extend direct sql querying

• Rationale:

  • To fully support our technical users, we need to allow them to ask any sort of question about their data that might not be fit for an interface

Values

• Fast, iterative and high output rather not slow and thoughtful - achieving this
• Feedback-driven not spec-driven - we do a decent job at this
• Missionary (we have a clear problem definition and are aligned on how impactful a solution would be) not mercenary - glimpses of this
• Collaborative not lone wolf - glimpses of this

Personas

Company Persona

• Primary
  • Size:
    • 20-75 employees
  • Stage:
    • Post-PMF
    • Series A-D
  • Customer type:
    • B2B/B2C/(B2B2C)
  • High expectation traits:
    • Use the modern data stack
    • Frontend uses typescript and react
    • High-growth
• Not:
  • API companies
  • Shopify stores/no-code companies

User Persona

• Primary
  • Role
    • Product-minded front-end engineer
    • Growth engineer
  • Seniority
    • Decision-making seat on product
    • Senior engineer
    • IC
  • High expectation traits
    • Reads HackerNews
    • Educated about the other feature flagging/experimentation tools in the space
    • Needs high-reliability and high-performance
    • Uses best-in-class tools such as Linear/Figma
• Secondary:
  • Role:
    • Product Manager
• Not:
  • Role:
    • Backend engineer
    • Marketing

Jobs to be done

Feature flags

• Primary
  • Safely rollout frontend features with the least risk
• Secondary
  • Persistent feature flags e.g. country/pay gate
  • Build/test in production
  • Enable beta users to try out experimental features ahead of time

Experimentation

• Primary
  • Test whether a particular feature achieves the desired change in user behavior

Feature ownership

You can find out more about the features we own here