tl;dr

This discussion was inspired by the recent internal thoughts from founders on ICP as well as the internal slack post from Jams. Sales has thought about this from a lead perspective. Wanted to get the marketing / content reaction and thoughts to it.

The main 2 take-aways from this conversation were:

1. Create an owner for ICP/personas. In immediate term kickstart an ICP project (temporary) team
2. As leaders on the topic, we have an opportunity to evolve the definition of Product Engineer

Discussion notes

PostHog ICP has always been high growth startups where engineers are decision makers. In terms of personas, we all know we are building for product engineers but PostHog is also used by marketers, data people, etc. The handbook and website has places where these are well documented. But there are some problems:

• We conflate ICPs and personas (product engineers get conflated with the PostHog ICP)
• Individuals are interpreting this themselves
• We end up going in circles around who to build for
• We don't split by user/buyer personas and also don't break out power users
• ICP has been fuzzy as well with different people and teams focusing on different iterations

Opportunities:

• Reframe: What are the goals of the people we care about? What products are they using?
• Refine an ICP (a few?) and the personas who is using the platform?
• Product teams can benefit from having user personas
• Creating destinations on the website for specific personas
• Take inspiration from sales team - lead scoring - what work have they done on that? Buyer personas?
• Break out ICP more into a few types of companies (0 to 1 is really important, growth stage, who else?)
• What is beyond product engineers?
• Someone(s) owns defining ICP and personas
• Who are we not focusing on?

ICP Projects (team) for this specific topic so it’s owned across teams - temporary team

Objectives:

• Create multiple personas, ICPs, and own it in handbook
  • ICPs in these spaces: Startup, scale up, mature
  • Personas: user / buyer personas

Ownership:

• Blitzcale rep - Raquel?
• Cleo wants to co-own this on Marketing side (maybe product marketing owns in future)
• Include reps from Sales, Engineering, etc

Format:

• Output is handbook pages
• Update them every time there are changes
• Meet with some cadence

Product Engineer 2.0

As thought leaders of product engineering, we’re helping to define it. What do we think we need to do to refine it for our purposes? Where is the definition now? Maybe we can continue to own and evolve it?

Current definition: A set of behaviors and specific vibes ex: 0 to 1, talks to users, opinionated about what they should be building and can work autonomously. In terms of skillset - full stack engineers (andy's post)

Considerations:

• Is this definition changing?
• Hard to define the technical piece. Full stack? Dev? Eng?
• Instead of talking about engineer as much and more about building
• Can be powerful if we shift emphasis on goal vs what people’s experience
• Can be much more diversity in the type of user that falls into prod engineer definition
• What is a product engineer? How does one become one?

How to we get to an exponential company?

1. Expand products to existing audience?
2. Expand existing customers?
3. Expand to new audiences?

Example: Replit was for engineers and now they care about builders. Hence their major success.

Participants

Andy (@andyvan-ph), Edwin (@edwinyjlim), Cleo (@cleo-pleurodon), Daniel H (@dphawkins1617), and Daniel Z