Growth Team

Growth Team

The Growth Team scheming up ways to chop prices in half at a recent meetup in San Luis Obispo, CA

People

Recently shipped

Person profiles launched, PostHog now up to 80% cheaper

Today we're starting to roll out optional person profiles — a new event processing option that makes it substantially cheaper to track anonymous users by giving you control of when to create person profiles for your tracked users.

You may be wondering: 'Why would I not want to create person profiles?'

In the past we've created person profiles for all users, all the time. This gave you a detailed, filterable view of every user who ever visited your site - but that was overkill for a lot of use-cases. Now, you have the option to only create person profiles when the user takes an important action, which means you can save a lot of money on the less-important events.

For example, this is especially useful if you track both your marketing site and product usage in PostHog. You probably only need profiles for logged-in users, so you can skip profiles for anonymous visitors and track their general usage in web analytics. Then, when a user logs in you can then collect their properties, groups, and various distinct IDs in a single person profile for deeper investigation in product analytics. It's the best of both worlds!

Person profiles are available now for a portion of our users and will become available to everyone over the coming weeks - you’ll see the Person profiles billing details on your organization billing page when it’s ready for you. Not collecting person profiles can reduce your bill by up to 80%, depending on volumes and usage type.

If you're an existing user, you’ll see changes on your next bill - your product analytics price will have gone down, and that difference has moved to the new Person Profiles line item. You won’t pay any extra money even if you continue to use person profiles for all users; we’ve simply split the cost. If you choose to not collect person profiles for all users, it will only save you money.

Ready to give it a go? First, check your organization billing page - if you see information about Person profiles there under product analytics, you’re ready to start using it. Head to the docs to find out how to set up your person profiles config option.

Goals

Q3 2024 Objectives

  • Objective 1: Make onboarding awesome for Product analytics and Data warehouse (Raquel)
    • Use templates, toolbar, and actions in analytics onboarding so people can get to insights more quickly.
    • Work with data warehouse team to make a bespoke flow to help people get their first integration set up.
    • Reasoning: Templates are useful for getting people to valuable insights quickly, but they have to wait for data to come in before they can use themes. If we use actions, they can be made right away. For DW, none of our current onboarding steps for getting data in are relevant - we need to think through this from scratch.
    • Metrics: Percent of new orgs that activate increases, retention goes up or stays the same, people actually use the flow.
  • Objective 2: Support self-serve annual commitments (Zach)
    • Reasoning: Annual commitments means we get more money now, reduces churn risk, and can be cheaper for customers. But, people have to talk to sales right now to get on these contracts. If they could self-serve this, we could theoretically sell more of them.
    • Metrics: We have the feature, and people use it.
    • Side hustle, if time permits: Figure out how to do experiments with pricing.
  • Objective 3: Dive into the data to understand our billing metrics and customers better (Zach)
    • Reasoning: We want to know:
      • How the startup program is performing and how we should change things there
      • How well we cross-sell and how that can be improved
      • Why CC input rate is going down, even though signups are going up.
      • If we can trust the revenue number every single day
    • Metrics: We have access to more stripe data in billing (i.e. stripe customer metadata), and we can answer the questions above.
  • Objective 4: Keep up with ongoing needs from our team:
    • Hire 2 people onto the team - one billing focused, one auth/permissions or growth focused (Raquel)
    • Launch pricing for Data warehouse (likely soon) (Raquel)
    • Launch pricing for CDP (if it's ready)

If we have time:

  • Build a better billing page that gives breakdowns by project, is easier to mentally parse, is more beautiful, etc.
  • Fix all the bugs and unknowns with auth (eg why xmlsec gives us so many problems)
  • Move CC entry into the app

Handbook

What the Growth team does

  • Sign up and authentication
  • Activation
    • Global onboarding flow
    • Develop tooling for individual product onboarding and activation
    • Help product teams leverage the tooling to create best-in-class onboarding & activation flows for their products
    • Improve cross-product pollination
  • Product led growth
    • Develop new products and strategies to increase top of funnel
  • Anything billing
    • Billing infrastructure
    • Pricing & self-serve revenue (in collaboration with each product team)
    • Revenue reporting
  • Internal metrics reporting (company scorecard)

How to work with the Growth team

In addition to covering specific areas of the product, members of the Growth team can temporarily join other small teams to execute jointly on growth-related tasks. This can be done by requesting help during Sprint planning, or at the beginning of the Quarter during the OKR definition phase.

Feature ownership

You can find out more about the features we own here