People & Ops
Team members
Grace McKenzie
Team leadFinance & Operations Lead
Coua Phang
Tech Talent Partner
Mission
Our primary goal is to build and retain our world-class team. We will accomplish this by making PostHog the most transparent company in the world, and the best place for people to work. Once on board, our goal is to enable our team to:
- Maximize their impact and performance
- Grow personally and professionally
- Have a strong sense of purpose and belonging
Objectives & key results
Q2 2023
- Objective:
- Build and improve our systems to support sustainable company growth.
- Key Results:
- Hire a Full Stack Engineer x2 (Analytics, Session Recording) and Technical Content Marketer
- Identify an accurate percentage of applicants who come from URG
- Ensure we stay within 5% of forecast cash burn
- Keep bad debt expense under 2% of monthly revenue
- Negotiate pre-committed AWS spend in order to cut at least 5% from our annual bill
- Generate $180k in total income this quarter purely from this team's work through things like R&D tax credits and interest
- Get our SOC 2 Type 1 report published
- Rationale:
- Given recent events with SVB, a quarter of extra focus on finance feels appropriate
- Now we have diversity data in Ashby, we want to use to improve our hiring processes
Responsibilities
Our people team works across talent, people, operations, and culture. This is what we care about:
- Setting a very high bar for bringing people on board. We are always looking for the best people in their field, or people on their way to becoming exceptional at their jobs. This is so important to us, it's enshrined in our values.
- Supporting our team throughout the entire employee lifecycle - from making an offer, to onboarding and progression, time off, and eventually parting ways.
- We create light-touch initiatives, systems, and processes that allow PostHog to act fast and scale iteratively
- Building a diverse and inclusive culture with a strong sense of belonging is at the heart of everything we do.
We use the RACI model to manage the various areas of focus within the team:
- R = Responsible - directly responsible for completing something
- A = Accountable - has final authority over completing something
- C = Consulted - needs to be brought in before a decision is made
- I = Informed - needs to be told when a decision is made
Responsible | Accountable | Consulted | Informed | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
People Ops | |||||
UK & US Payroll | Kendal | Grace | Coua, Charles | ||
Deel Payroll | Kendal | Grace | Coua, Charles | ||
UK & US Pension/401k | Grace | Grace | Charles | Kendal, Coua | |
UK & US Benefits | Grace | Grace | Charles | Kendal, Coua | |
Offer Letters | Coua | Coua | Charles | Grace, Kendal | |
Onboarding Process | Grace | Grace | Kendal | Coua | |
State Registrations | Grace | Grace | Kendal | Charles | |
Managing Merch | Kendal | Grace | Charles | ||
Compensation Reviews | Grace | Charles | |||
Conduct Management | Charles | Charles | |||
Termination Decisions | Charles | Charles | Grace | ||
Termination Process | Grace | Charles | Kendal | ||
Offboarding Process | Kendal | Grace | |||
Recruiting | |||||
Sourcing | Coua | Coua | |||
Pipeline Management | Coua | Coua | Grace | ||
Interview Scheduling | Coua | Coua | |||
Offer Decisions | Coua | Charles | Grace, Kendal | ||
Referral Bonuses | Coua | Grace | |||
Culture | |||||
Team Celebrations | Kendal | Grace | |||
Offsites | Grace | Grace | Charles, Kendal | ||
Quarterly Surveys | Grace | Charles | |||
DE&I Initiatives | Charles | Charles | Grace, Coua | ||
Organizing Team 121s | Grace | Grace | Coua, Kendal | ||
Passion Talks/Life Stories | Kendal | ||||
Finance | |||||
Accounting - US | Grace | Charles | |||
Accounting - UK | Grace | Charles | |||
Financial Planning/Review | Charles | Charles | Grace | ||
Board Reporting | Charles | Charles | Grace | ||
Insurances | Grace | Grace | Kendal | ||
Chasing Receipts/Invoice | Kendal | Grace | |||
Legal | |||||
Commercial Agreements | Charles | Charles | Grace | ||
Fundraising Agreements | Charles | Charles | Grace | ||
IP & Confidentiality | Charles | Charles | Grace | ||
Privacy & Compliance | Grace | Charles | |||
UK Options Scheme | Grace | Charles | Coua | ||
US Options Scheme | Grace | Charles | Coua | ||
Systems | |||||
Zendesk | Grace | Grace | Charles | ||
Equipment Management | Kendal | Grace | |||
Accounts Management | Grace | Grace | Coua | ||
Mail Monitoring | Kendal | Grace |
Customer
Every PostHog team member, as well as current, future and past candidates.
Team 121s
On a monthly basis, People & Ops offer every team member an optional, informal check-in about life and work, and as an opportunity to provide any feedback on how the company runs as a whole.
The breakdown of assignments is:
Charles:
- Marius
- Michal
- Cory
- Tim
- Eric
Grace:
- James G.
- Li
- Alex
- Eli
- Cameron
- Yakko
- James H.
- Joe
- Ellie
- Lottie
- Raquel
Coua:
- Simon
- Harry
- Andy
- Ian
- Neil
- Daniel
- Annika
- Ben
- Kendal
- Xavier
- Frank
Kendal:
- Paul D'A.
- Tiina
- Thomas
- Tomás
Slack channels
- #team-people-and-ops - internally public, default for ops & people discussions
- #private-people-ops - internally confidential, for minority of issues, e.g. salaries, candidate offers
Tools
Here is a summary of some of the tools we've found most effective for getting the job done. You can read more about why we chose them here. Grace and/or Charles are top level admins for all of these, should you need access.
People Ops, Recruiting, and Payroll
- Ashby - our ATS for managing all recruitment (you can find their full documentation here.
- Gusto - platform for managing all permanent US employees, including contracts, healthcare and payroll.
- We use Middesk to manage all our state registrations and filings on our behalf.
- For managing our US 401(k) we use Pentegra, which requires a manual monthly reporting process.
- We are currently migrating to Guideline, which will take effect on Feb 1st 2023.
- Deel - platform for managing all team members outside the US and UK (using their EOR service in certain countries).
- UK contracts are currently done manually in Google Drive, with payroll also being run manually - our accountants load up payments in Revolut for us to approve every month. All templates are stored in the Legal Docs [CONFIDENTIAL] shared Google Drive, in the Team folder.
- US contracts are also done manually in Google Drive.
- To avoid emailing PDFs back and forth forever, we use PandaDoc.
- PTO by Deel - Slack app for booking all types of time off.
- CharlieHR - used to store all team personal details, documents, and pay. We are in the process of migrating this to Deel HR.
Finance and Banking
Details can be found in company-internal
repo here
Everything Else
- LTSE Equity is where we manage our cap table.
- For those pesky externalities, we use Embroker for all of our insurance coverage, including D&O, Cyber Liability, and Travel.
- A bit unusual for an operations team, we track everything in GitHub from maintaining this handbook to sprint planning. You can find the People & Ops project board here.