Things we've learned about building products

Wow. 900 applications down to 10 &quot;SuperDay&quot; participants down to 4 hires. All to work at.... posthog. What a depressing statistic.<p>This felt like a humble brag to help make their point about hiring good talent and how many people want to be a hogger (or whatever they call people that work there) but this just really highlights how brutal the job market is. Yes the market is also flooded with unqualified applicants and or bots that will apply to any job listing thats posted, but still this is ridiculous.<p>I really feel bad for the 6 people who had to endure the technical interview AND THEN were given the honor of attending the &quot;SuperDay&quot; which sounds like a full day of at least 5 interviews, 2 - 3 being technical, and still got rejected. Not sure what the technical interview is like at posthog, but assuming this is just an hour phone screen those 6 people still probably had more than 7 hours devoted just to interviewing at this place just to get rejected. That&#x27;s not including any time spent preparing for interviews or anything else either.<p>There must be a better way to do interviews. Posthog is not Google, Posthog (or any other startup) does not need to hire to the same standard that Google does.<p>Let me know when you&#x27;re on par with Google in terms of revenue or benefits or prestige, or anything else really that Google offers then sure I will jump through as many hoops as you want for the interview. Until then, hard pass.

This list mentions A&#x2F;B testing a few times and it&#x27;s worth noting that A&#x2F;B testing is great but it&#x27;s not free.<p>I&#x27;ve seen a nontrivial number of smart engineers get bogged down in wanting to A&#x2F;B test everything that they spend more time building and maintaining the experiment framework than actually shipping more product and then realizing the A&#x2F;B testing was useless because they only had a few hundred data points. Data-driven decisions are definitely valuable but you also have to recognize when you have no data to drive the decisions in the first place.<p>Overall, I agree with a lot of the list but I&#x27;ve seen that trap one too many times when people take the advice too superficially.

I know this is not related to the article, which is great, but I am wondering how long &quot;posthog&quot; is going to be the name of this company given what &quot;post hog&quot; means.

These are ok. They&#x27;re great to highlight the surface area of product building. But the list is very biased from an analytics and testing perspective because posthog product is analytics and testing.<p>Capturing analytics is a no brainer. however, most data in most products at most companies starting out just fundamentally does not matter. It&#x27;s dangerous to get in the habit of &quot;being data driven&quot; because it becomes a false sense of security and paradoxically data is extremely easy to be biased with. And even with more rigor, you get too easily trapped in local optimums. Lastly, all things decay, but data and experimentation runs as is if the win is forever, until some other test beats it. It becomes exhausting to touch anything and that&#x27;s seen as a virtue. it&#x27;s not.<p>Products need vision and taste.

18. Instead, forcing PRs into day of work unit, it is better to be minimum testable increment. Some features just need more work to be tested. Forcing everything into tiny tickets make both planning tedious and often introduce bugs in half finished features.<p>22. I saw design system fail in many companies. It is very hard to get right people and budget for this to succeed. For most startups are better to pick existing UI toolkit and do some theming&#x2F;tweaking.<p>27. I disagree, If you put Product manager as gatekeeper to users you will transform the organization into a feature factory. Engineers should be engaged with users as much as possible.

Thought on this one:<p>&gt; Trust is also built with transparency. Work in public, have discussions in the open, and document what you’re working on. This gives everyone the context they need, and eliminates the political squabbles that plague many companies.<p>This seems prone to feedback loops; it can go both directions. If there are political squabbles, discussion may be driven private, to avoid it getting shut down or derailed by certain people.

&gt; Rely on trust and feedback, not process<p>Process is important when work is handed off from one team to another team. Any company with a non-trivial product will have a non-trivial team size; and thus it&#x27;ll need to standardize how people hand off work.<p>It doesn&#x27;t have to be onerous: The best processes are simply establishing boundaries so lazy people don&#x27;t throw their work over to the next person. (IE, &quot;I won&#x27;t work on a bug without steps to reproduce and an unedited tracelog that captures the failure&quot; is a good boundary.)

&gt; Your product is downstream from your ideal customer profile (ICP).<p>Do not start with an <i>idea</i>. Start with a <i>problem</i>, and then construct a <i>solution</i>. The solution is the product. The problem implies someone who has that problem: this is the customer. How much of a problem it is tells you how much they want it and how much they will pay for it. Because an idea doesn&#x27;t necessarily have a problem, it results in a product that doesn&#x27;t necessarily have a customer.<p>&gt; As 37Signal’s Jason Fried says “You cannot validate an idea. It doesn’t exist, you have to build the thing. The market will validate it.”<p>Similarly, don&#x27;t set out to change the world. Put your product into the world, and the world will decide whether to change as a consequence.

I just want to say this blog is one of the best engineering&#x2F;product blogs out there. I’ve been an avid reader for a while and always learn something. Very inspirational.

The problem with having such a specific, prescriptive formula for success is that it never actually works out that way. Sure, there are high-level principles, the PostHog team executes brilliantly, and I love the product, but I think we&#x27;re really bad at connecting the dots on what actually made something successful. Instead, we assign credit to random things just to make it all make sense. A lot of times, it&#x27;s the equivalent of saying, &quot;Bill Gates eats this cereal for breakfast, so if I do that, I should become a billionaire too.&quot;

Posthog&#x27;s newsletter is one of the few I re-subscribed to after a general newsletter purge, top content.<p>Regarding the superday controversy: my best interviewing experience was a conversational technical interview followed by a paid-either-way-the-decision-went 2 week project. I did quite a bit of competitive programming so leetcode interviews are not a dealbreaker for me, but I feel there&#x27;s just too much at stake for 1-2h coding exercise, and projects allow you to showcase all of your skills, not just speedcoding.

I was always very passionate about programming and startups or small team&#x2F;co, but I never even got to the first round because of my undergraduate degree. I think I would have tried hard given an opportunity and worked with lot of discipline and passion. So now I have my own small team and I try to see if someone who doesn&#x27;t have the right background but still willing to learn and is passionate about building stuff. It is probably not the idea of the author and he is right in his approach as it has been established, but I will test and see if what I am trying will work or not.

&gt; If you’re going to pivot, make it big.<p>This is a great point. I&#x27;ve seem teams apply lean startup by testing -&gt; changing something -&gt; testing -&gt; changing something -&gt; testing ...<p>The problem is that the changes are so small that statistically you end up testing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You need to make a significant change in your Persona, Problem, Promise, or Product to (hopefully) see promising results.

In the first image in the article, what is a &quot;SuperDay&quot;?<p>Is this like a trial day where you&#x27;re invited to do a day of work for free?

900 applications down to 4 hires looks like a small percentage to be optimistic about the market...

Wait, i wouldnt hire someone who is ok spending so many hours after the first few hours, it shows me that he or ave can&#x27;t handle the sunk cost trap and will fall again and again. But ok, that&#x27;s my wr9ng opinion about this

There are companies out there that probably do none of these things and are x1000 more successful from a revenue or market cap perspective. Seems like the biggest successes are simply being at the right place at the right time and not being a complete idiot. Nobody wants to hear that though.

A lot of psychological safety here. This is fundamental for team success.

Maybe a hot take, but I think it’s better to build a successful startup with developers of average skill, intellect, and competence. You don’t need to obsess over finding genius level savants, unless the startup is a serious deep tech company. SaaS products will be fine with normal developers. Set up a process so you’re iterating and learning quickly, and it will be ok.<p>I’d be surprised if any startup failures were due to a dev team not being absolutely cracked. It’s always something like poor sales, PMF, refusal to pivot, lack of focus, etc.

#2 and #3 are sort of symbiotic. If you have a bad hire, then it&#x27;s going to be difficult to give them autonomy.

Sorry, what &quot;successful products&quot;?<p>And I have to say that &quot;Technical Content Marketer &quot; is one of the most dubious job titles I have ever seen.

All that for product analytics? Lmao