Product engineers

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Mar 23, 2025

What engineers get wrong about communication

Ian Vanagas

Engineers spend most of their time doing two things: coding and communicating. The first has endless amounts written about it; the second much less so. To address this injustice, we're sharing: The biggest mistakes we see engineers make when…

Feb 27, 2025
50 things we’ve learned about building successful products
To celebrate 50k subscribers to Product for Engineers, here are the 50 most important lessons we've learned about building successful products: Small teams (6 people or fewer) can build great products, but they need to be given autonomy to set their…
Mar 6, 2025
Good taste makes great products
When we talk about how to be a good product engineer , we often focus on how you need to ship fast, be customer obsessed, and take extreme ownership of ideas . But one important quality is subjective: taste. Taste means intuition for what makes a…
Nov 28, 2024
How we found our activation metric (and how you can too)
People are signing up for your product. Great! But before you start planning your IPO, you need to make sure they actually stick around. This is the goal of activation . The trouble with activation is that it is hard to define. Many say it is when a…
Feb 6, 2025
WTF is activation and why should engineers care?
Improving activation is one of the most impactful things a product engineer can do, but it’s also weirdly hard to define. People often call it your product’s "aha" moment – i.e. when a user experiences your product's value for the first time – but…
Jan 23, 2025
Don't make these feature flag mistakes
Here are two important, related facts: Product engineers succeed when they ship quickly, understand if a change is working, and iterate. You need feature flags to do so because they let you ship, deploy, and release software safely, and quickly…
Oct 24, 2024
Why you're bad at giving feedback
"Feedback is a gift…" or so they say. But are your gifts useful, or are they more like the third pair of socks you get at Christmas? Delivering actionable feedback is hard. You need to be brutally honest while at the same time not discouraging. In…
Sep 26, 2024
How to think like a growth engineer
For the unfamiliar, growth engineers seemingly bounce around the product aimlessly – tweaking signup flows, optimizing onboarding, and running endless experiments (many of which fail). It's tempting to dismiss this as busywork, but that’s a mistake…
Nov 14, 2024
How we choose technologies
Over the past 12 months, we have: Expanded our usage of Temporal to power warehouse syncs . Moved destinations and transformations away from Node virtual machines to our home-built HogVM in our own language, Hog. Migrated more of our highest…
Aug 6, 2024
A/B testing mistakes I learned the hard way
Running experiments is equal parts powerful and terrifying. Powerful because you can validate changes that will transform your product for the better; terrifying because there are so many ways to mess them up. I’ve run hundreds of A/B tests, both in…
Oct 9, 2024
Actionable mobile app metrics you should track (with benchmarks)
This guide covers 25 mobile app metrics and KPIs across five categories that can provide valuable insights into your app's success. We've focused on specific, actionable metrics rather than broad ones like daily active users (DAU), or the number of…
Aug 29, 2024
Doing support makes you a better engineer
Product engineers do support at PostHog. They log into Zendesk, respond to users, debug their issues, and ship fixes. This isn’t typical. Most engineers don't do support, and most will be unhappy when you suggest they should. Common pushbacks include…
Jan 11, 2024
Features - you're building them wrong if...
If your process for deciding to build looks like this, you are going to be slow:
Jul 4, 2024
How we do dogfooding at PostHog (with examples)
Dogfood is not on PostHog's roadmap, but it sure does shape it. Dogfooding is the process of using your product internally. This helps you to get fast feedback, ship a higher-quality product, and maintain customer empathy. At PostHog, we dogfood a…
May 29, 2024
The most useful customer retention metrics, ranked
You put a lot of work into getting people to use your product, but how much work do you put into keeping them? In this guide we’ll cover the key customer retention metrics, who they’re useful for, and how to calculate them. We’ve also put together…
Aug 14, 2023
In-depth: How to measure product-market fit
Startups can't succeed without achieving product-market fit – it's one of the few things startup gurus agree on. It's often described as a feeling – a palpable excitement from users, or a sense you can't keep up with demand. You either have it…
May 8, 2024
Product metrics to track for LLM apps
LLM-powered apps differ in three key ways when compared to regular SaaS apps: Costs are closely tied to app usage. Request latency spikes and errors are more common. LLM output is unpredictable and can lead to a negative user experience. This means…
Apr 25, 2024
An engineer’s guide to talking to users
1. You have an information bottleneck We have a simple theory about building successful products: the people building them should be as close to people using them as possible. You might think you already know what users want. Someone spoke to users…
Nov 1, 2023
How we designed our company for speed
Clearly there are exceptions, but we ship a lot faster than the average company. Our first line of code was January 22nd, 2020, after a pivot during a YC batch. Since then, we've shipped: Product analytics Session replay Feature flags A/B testing…
Mar 11, 2024
What engineers get wrong about analytics
Regular readers will know we think engineers today need to get involved in product decisions , talk to users, and analyze usage data. It’s a core part of how we designed our company for speed . But not all engineers are totally comfortable with…

What engineers get wrong about communication

50 things we’ve learned about building successful products

Good taste makes great products

How we found our activation metric (and how you can too)

WTF is activation and why should engineers care?

Don't make these feature flag mistakes

Why you're bad at giving feedback

How to think like a growth engineer

How we choose technologies

A/B testing mistakes I learned the hard way

Actionable mobile app metrics you should track (with benchmarks)

Doing support makes you a better engineer

Features - you're building them wrong if...

How we do dogfooding at PostHog (with examples)

The most useful customer retention metrics, ranked

In-depth: How to measure product-market fit

Product metrics to track for LLM apps

An engineer’s guide to talking to users

How we designed our company for speed

What engineers get wrong about analytics