Charles Cook's README

This guide might be helpful in working with me.

Areas of responsibility

As an individual contributor (80%):

• Marketing
  • Figuring out how to grow our word of mouth in marketing
  • Planning, designing and running marketing campaigns throughout the year
• Ops
  • Any legal matters, including compliance and privacy - I am the main point of contact with our lawyers
  • Financial planning - I own our financial model
  • Investor relations and fundraising - I support Tim and James, and do all the legal paperwork with our lawyers
  • Board meetings - scheduling, agenda, and creating the board pack
• People
  • I do regular 1-1s with half of the team to chat about non-work stuff (Grace does the other half)
  • I contribute to our people and culture initiatives, like running BookHogs

As a manager (20%):

• Providing context on ops & people priorities for PostHog - I lead the Ops & People small team
• Providing context on marketing priorities for PostHog - I lead the Marketing small team
• Managing our external paid ads agency

Quirks

• I make a lot of jokes at my own expense. I encourage you to as well.
• You don't have to 'earn' my trust - I like to assume high trust with people I work with from the start and go from there.
• I definitely err on the side of speed at the expense of polish. Sometimes this means I don't take enough time to bring other people on board when I should.
• I'm hyper responsive across any channel (email/Slack/text) during working hours - don't worry about interrupting me if you have a question! Always happy to take a quick call too if you prefer. I'm typically at my desk and available 10am-6pm UK time.
• I don't respond to work emails or Slack at evenings or weekends. If something really urgent comes up during the week or at the weekend, you'll need to text or Signal me. I don't have WhatsApp.
• I tend towards being generous with spending money, especially if it means getting something done faster.

What I value

• Brutal honesty, delivered kindly.
• Kindness generally, in fact.
• Not taking yourself too seriously and keeping a sense of perspective.
• Speed - I can get frustrated if people don't move as quickly as I like to.
• People who understand privilege and how it affects power dynamics.
• Taking on something that is outside your comfort zone if no one else is available.

How I can help you

• I can share more context on what our marketing strategy is and how we position ourselves.
• I can help you unblock any legal or financial issues. Anything admin-related really. I try to do this really quickly, especially if it's customer-related.
• I can be a listening ear any time you need, for work or non-work stuff. I am extremely patient and non-judgemental.
• I can provide you with general career advice, especially if you are a generalist and feel like you should be a specialist.
• I can help you figure out where X account is, what our Y number is or where we keep Z thingy if Grace isn't around.
• I can help you with general life admin advice (especially in the UK).

How you can help me

• If you need me to do an actual task for you (rather than just answer a question) and it doesn't belong in GitHub, please shoot me an email instead of Slack, as it's easier for me to track.
• Tell me what we could be doing better from a company-building perspective. I'm particularly interested in unusual ideas.
• Give feedback on our marketing initiatives - especially if you are a developer! Product leads Marketing at PostHog.
• Let me know when I need to slow down and do something to a higher standard.
• I try to make sure our ops systems for things like expenses have an absolutely minimal impact on your time. Please don't make me (or Grace) chase you for boring admin stuff like that.
• If you need something from me, let me know when you need it by. Otherwise I'll probably do it immediately, which might come at the expense of something more important.

Things I need to get better at

This is a summary of the feedback I've received in recent reviews and 360 feedback sessions that I'm currently working on:

• Be more opinionated in our approach to marketing - champion the PostHog brand externally more.
• Do fewer things but increase the awesomeness of them. Pre-mortem big initiatives.
• Be better at asking other people for help and sharing vulnerability.