Deciding which products we build

Last updated:

|Edit this page

Providing all the tools in one is a core part of our strategy.

Shipping them in the right order is key to a fast return on investment from every new product.

Products we build into the platform should:

  • Be recognizable/positioned as products that our ICP already uses. We don't want to ship a new product unless it already has product-market fit somewhere else.

  • Improve our other products – for example, by using or adding to customer or product data

  • Be designed to enable us to get in first with that product (even if in practice we often rip and replace an existing product)

  • Help customers build more successful products (this doesn't just mean writing code, it means commercial stuff too).

  • Work with our snippet, so customers can switch on new functionality immediately.

This diagram shows example products we could ship:

a diagram showing which products we could build in which order

At earlier stage companies, technical founders will do every role, so tools traditionally used by those further from engineering (i.e. support) are likely to get usage if built into PostHog's platform. In later stage companies, we need - for now - to remain closer to engineering tools

If we decide to build a product, we should build the version that gets adopted earliest, to avoid having to rip and replace an existing solution. For example, we are currently working on a data warehouse. We need this to work for people that have not already got a warehouse set up – it needs to be inexpensive and simple.

Questions?

Was this page useful?

Next article

We're a wide company with small teams

Part of our strategy is to provide all the tools in one for evaluating feature success. Speed This means we need to ship a lot of products into one platform. We can see a need for at least 20. That's a lot of engineering work. After we'd started hiring, we asked ourselves a question – how could we structure the company to optimize for speed above everything else? I happened to go to an excellent talk by Jeff Lawson (Twilio CEO). It made me realize I should be asking, "Who ships more per…

Read next article