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      • Releasing a new version
      • Handling incidents
      • Bug prioritization
      • Event ingestion explained
      • Making schema changes safely
      • How to optimize queries
      • How to write an async migration
      • How to run migrations on PostHog Cloud
      • Working with ClickHouse materialized columns
      • Deployments support
      • Working with cloud providers
      • How-to access PostHog Cloud infra
      • Developing the website
      • MDX setup
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      • Data storage or what is a MergeTree
      • Data replication
      • Data ingestion
      • Working with JSON
      • Query performance
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        • Overview
        • sharded_events
        • app_metrics
        • person_distinct_id
    • Shipping things, step by step
    • Feature flags specification
    • Setting up SSL locally
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    • Our philosophy
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    • Designing posthog.com
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      • Paid ads
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  • Our philosophy

Design philosophy

Last updated: Sep 25, 2022

On this page

  • Different ~by~ with design
  • Our philosophy started with our website

Looking for our brand style guide? Look no further.

Different ~by~ with design

Design at PostHog works differently than most companies. We fundamentally believe that we can differentiate ourselves with design – by thinking outside the box and pushing boundaries. This means we're not structured like a typical design org.

How our customers interact with product analytics (and other tools) has largely remained unchanged since these tools were created over the past couple decades. There's nothing wrong with how they work currently, but people were also very happy with riding horses until cars were widely adopted.

Does that mean we're going to change how everything works? Not necessarily. It just means we have the freedom to try different things and see what sticks.

Our philosophy started with our website

Our first design hire was our graphic designer, Lottie. It's not every day you see a graphic designer in the first 5 hires! This was the result of a belief by our founders that having a bold, yet relatable brand would be a differentiator.

After a year of constant iteration on our website and docs over 2021-2022, we landed in a place where our website is now a reference for many other startups who are looking to do something innovative with their websites.

We're now extending this thinking into our product.

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Product design process

"No design by default" We encourage engineers to act like feature owners, carrying a project from ideation to completion. We maintain a design system in Storybook so engineers can build high-quality features independently, as much as possible. Because engineers choose their sprint tasks near the beginning of a sprint (and product doesn't plan tasks for engineers in advance), our process doesn't allow for us to have a product manager and a designer to work closely together before a task…

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Author

  • James Hawkins
    James Hawkins

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