/Ian Vanagas

How To Think Like A Growth Engineer tl;dr: “Growth engineers discover and capture these gains through their unique way of thinking and working. Luckily, you don't need to go to growth engineer school to learn their secrets. It all starts by learning to think like they do – here's how.”

featured in #575


How We Choose Technologies tl;dr: “Our solution is trust and feedback over process and letting product teams own the process from beginning to end. We can't tell you what technologies to use, or the perfect way to pick them, but this is how our company of ~60, remote and async people does it.”

featured in #568


Doing Support Makes You A Better Engineer tl;dr: Ian covers: (1) Doing support makes you a better engineer. (2) Why engineers do support at PostHog. (3) Creating a support process built for engineers. (4) How to scale engineers doing support.

featured in #553


Using Your Own Product Is A Superpower tl;dr: “Everyone at PostHog “dogfoods” our product, including non-product teams like marketing and sales. This helps ship faster, intercept problems, stay motivated, deeply understand our product and develop empathy. But none of this happens by accident. It requires a strong, intentional culture of feedback, transparency, and simple, repeatable processes. This is how we do it.”

featured in #547


An Engineer’s Guide To Talking To Users tl;dr: (1) You have an information bottleneck. (2) How to prepare for a user interview. (3) How to find the right users to talk to. (4) What to ask during user interviews. (5) Avoid these common mistakes. (6) What to do after an interview. (7) Talking to users doesn't stop at user interviews. 

featured in #539


An Engineer’s Guide To Talking To Users tl;dr: (1) How to prepare for a user interview. (2) How to find the right users to talk to. (3) What to ask during user interviews. (4) Mistakes to avoid. (5) What to do after an interview. 

featured in #511


How We Decide What To Build tl;dr: “There is a point in your product journey where what to build next goes from obvious to unclear. The options seem endless and choosing correctly can be the difference between a thriving product and a failing one.” Ian discusses how to navigate this. 

featured in #506


How We Work Asynchronously tl;dr: Besides being difficult to pronounce, being asynchronous means people can work autonomously and on their own schedule, even if other teams members aren’t immediately available. This post shares PostHog's not-so-secret strategies for working asynchronously across 11 countries.

featured in #476


How To Uncover Your Users' Real Problems tl;dr: Users are like kids at Christmas. They say they really want this one thing, but that one thing won’t keep them happy for long. Solving their unspoken problems will. And the best way to uncover them is to ask really good questions. This post covers what the best lessons PostHog has learned about asking user's questions.

featured in #475


10 Things We've Learned About A/B Testing For Startups tl;dr: “In this week’s issue, we explore the secrets of running truly successful A/B tests (and some pitfalls to avoid).” These include: (1) You need to embrace failure. (2) Good A/B tests have 5 traits. (3) Use the “right place, right time” rule. (4) Create a proposal system. (5) Understanding significance. And more.

featured in #454