James presents a topic of the day each week in the company all hands. The main objective of this is to repeat and reinforce key messages:
- Make sure everyone knows what our mission is, and how their work contributes
- Make sure everyone knows what our strategy is, and how their work contributes
- This can be company strategy, but also product, GTM, pricing, hiring etc.
- Reinforce good cultural behavior/our values
An element of repetition is important because a) we are regularly adding new people to the team, and b) just hearing a message once is not enough for it to stick. 'Repetition' does not mean literally saying the same words over and over again - it's more about finding examples of things people are doing or working on, and showing how those tie back to the bigger picture of what's important at PostHog.
We generally avoid using the topic of the day to announce new things, as these should be done async. Sometimes he will go deeper on a recent announcement, e.g. why we cut pricing for X.
Important topics to revisit regularly
- PostHog’s mission - to help engineers build better products
- How we’re building an enduring company
- PostHog’s overall strategy
- Every tool you need to evaluate feature success
- Get in first
- Be the source of truth for customer and product data
- Principles around:
- Which products to build and why
- Who our ICP is and how to work with them
- How to price products, inc. what we make free
- How we do brand and marketing
- How we do sales
- How to hire well
- Our values and how to maintain PostHog's culture
- The values themselves
- Communication
- Giving and receiving feedback
- How small teams work