Meetings

We are anti-meeting by default.

However, while we default to written and asynchronous communication, we find that having a few regular touch points for the whole team to come together on a call useful for sharing certain types of information, strengthening our culture and discussing more dynamic issues in real time.

We keep these minimal in terms of time expectation - no more than 2hrs total per week. They are usually scheduled around 8.30am PDT/4.30pm GMT to allow people across multiple timezones to attend more easily. We default to cameras on, it’s nice to see real faces since we don’t get many in-person moments. If you need yours off, just give the team a quick heads-up why.

You should have been invited to any relevant meetings as part of your onboarding.

Weekly schedule

• Monday - PostHog News all-hands meeting. Members of the team share company-wide updates about things like recruitment, product metrics and commercial performance - the doc is shared in the #general channel in Slack. We then go around and people are free to demo anything they've been working on recently. The content of these meetings is always confidential. All hands meetings are recorded too if you are out. Some teams also do sprint planning on a Monday.
• Tuesday - Meeting-free - no planned internal meetings allowed. Learn more.
• Wednesday - some teams do sprint planning here as well. Engineering tech talks/brown bags happen every second week, ClickHouse office hours happen on the alternate week.
• Thursday - Meeting-free - no planned internal meetings allowed. Learn more.
• Friday - extracurricular type meetings like BookHog often end up here!

The all-hands

The Monday all-hands features a few regular sections and is recorded in this document.

• Announcements: Revenue and churn updates, plus other major news
• Hiring: Updates about headcount, who is starting soon, and new hiring roles
• Acknowledgements: Opportunity to give kudos to your colleagues
• Topic of the day: Exec team talks around a particular topic
• Q&A with James & Tim: Ask the founders anything you want
• Demos: Show us what you've worked on last week

How to give a good demo

Demos are a great way to share what you've been working on and keep everyone in the loop. A little prep goes a long way toward making them useful and respectful of everyone's time. It also stops the meeting length getting out of hand!

• Test your setup before you start. Make sure screen sharing and your microphone work so you can dive straight in. A quick check a few minutes before the meeting avoids awkward fumbling and keeps the energy up.
• Keep it short and purposeful. Aim for quick, concise demos. It can help to write down some bullets to structure your demo ahead of time. Lead with why what you built is useful or interesting — that context helps people stay engaged and can be especially useful for less technical teams.
• Don't rely on real-time. If your demo involves triggering other services (e.g. sending emails or calling APIs), cue them up in advance or use mocks. Live demos are fun when they work but can eat into everyone's time when we're waiting for something to load.
• Arrive with energy. We don't expect polished sales pitches, but it's always more engaging to listen to someone who is excited to show what they've made.
• It's okay to skip or shorten. If something isn't working or you run out of time, feel free to skip it and move on. You can always share a Loom in #tell-posthog-anything so people can watch when it suits them.
• Be ready when it's your turn. Pay attention to the order of raised hands and be prepared to speak when you're up. It keeps the flow smooth and shows you're tuned in to the group.

When in doubt: a short, clear demo that explains the "so what?" beats a long one that leaves people wondering why it matters.

No meeting days (Tuesdays & Thursdays)

We try to keep these days focused on deep work. Therefore, we run no planned meetings on these days.

However, speaking ad-hoc to your teammates on this day is fine - especially:

• new people shouldn't worry about following this rule for the first couple of weeks - it's more important you get up-to-speed quickly
• if it's obvious you need a meeting

If ad-hoc meetings are regularly happening, consider improving the agenda of another regular meeting so there isn't as much context switching in people's days.

People in customer-facing roles where being on calls is a bigger part of your job don't need to stick to this as much, but please don't loop in engineers to customer calls on these days if you do by default.

Sprint planning

Each small team runs its own sprint planning meetings on whatever schedule you feel is most useful. Some teams do this on a Monday, others on a Wednesday, and sprints are usually 1-2 weeks long. We split into Small Teams for these. If a product team, your team's exec will also attend.

All sprint planning meetings are open to anyone to attend - if you are not a member of that small team, then we ask that you sit in as a non-speaking observer only.