People & Ops Team

People & Ops

Team members

Charles Cook
Team lead
Operations & Marketing
Grace McKenzie
Operations Manager
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

Q1 2023

Objective:
- Make PostHog the best place anybody has ever worked.
Key Results:
- Hiring: Hire a Full Stack Engineer x2 (Product Analytics, Experimentation) and an SRE
- Hiring: Start reporting diversity of pipeline on a monthly basis
- Culture: Run a whole team offsite that at least 80% of the team rate as 4/5
- Culture: Set up regular team surveys and ensure at least 90% responsiveness
- Finance: Ensure we stay within 5% of forecast cash burn
- Finance: 100% of monthly reports are shared with the team before the end of the following month
- Ops: Complete our SOC 2 audit and get certified.
Rationale:
- Our ops run smoothly already, so it doesn’t make sense to invest more time for marginal gains here.
- We should focus on making the experience of working at PostHog as pleasant and enjoyable as possible.

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 ie who is in charge of getting the work done
A = Accountable ie who ensures that the work gets done
C = Consulted ie who needs to be brought in on decisions
I = Informed ie who needs to be told when decisions are made

		Charles	Grace	Coua
People Ops
	UK payroll	I	R,A	C,I
	UK pension	I	R,A	C,I
	UK benefits	I	R,A	C,I

	US payroll	I	R,A	C,I
	US 401(k)	I	R,A	C,I
	US benefits	I	R,A	C,I

	Offer letters	C	I	R,A
	Onboarding - legal	I	R,A	C,I
	Onboarding - company	C,I	C,I	R,A
	State registrations	I	R,A	C,I

	Compensation reviews	C,I	R	C,I
	Conduct management	R,A	I	C,I
	Termination decisions	R,A	I	C,I
	Offboarding process	A	R,A	C,I


Recruiting
	Sourcing	C,I		R,A
	Pipeline management	C,I		R,A
	Interview scheduling			R,A
	Offer decisions	C	I	R,A
	Referral bonuses	C	I	R,A

Culture
	Team celebrations	I	C,I	R,A
	Offsites	C,I	R,A	I
	Team surveys.	C,I	C,I	R,A
	DE&I initiatives	R,A	R	R
	Team 121s	R	R,A	R
	Passion Talks/Life Stories	I	R,A	I

Finance
	Accounting - US	C,I	R,A
	Accounting - UK	C,I	R,A
	Financial planning	R,A	R	I
	Board reporting	R,A	R
	Insurances	C,I	R,A

Legal
	Commercial agreements	R,A	R
	Fundraising	R,A
	IP & Confidentiality.	R,A	C,I
	New agreements	R,A	C,I
	Privacy & Compliance	R,A	R
	UK options scheme	R	R,A	C
	US options scheme	R	R,A	C

Systems
	Customer support	C,I	R,A
	Equipment management	C	R,A
	Accounts management	A	R
	Mail monitoring	C,I	R,A

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
Karl
Michal
Cory
Paul D'A.
Tim
Guido
Tiina
Eric
Em
Thomas

Grace:

James G.
Li
Alex
Eli
Cameron
Yakko
James H.
Joe
Ellie
Lottie
Luke
Raquel

Coua:

Simon
Harry
Andy
Ian
Paul H.
Neil
Daniel
Annika
Ben
Kendal
Xavier

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 Roots - 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 Org Chart by Roots.

Finance and Banking

Accounting:
- For the US, we use Fondo. We have a shared Slack channel with them.
- For the UK, we use DRG. Everything is managed by email.
- Our accountants also manage all regulatory tax filings and payments on our behalf.
Banking:
- Brex is our main account, which we also use for team credit cards and expense management.
- We also have savings accounts with Mercury and SVB.
Pry (now part of Brex) is our main financial planning tool.
LTSE Equity is where we manage our cap table.
Anrok helps us stay on top of any state and local tax obligations triggered by employee presence or sales volume, and connects seamlessly and imports sales data from Stripe. They also provide automated support for registering with local tax authorities to automate the remittance process (though we don't use this part of their service yet).

Everything Else

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.