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.
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.
- Tuesday - Meeting-free - no regularly scheduled internal meetings allowed. Learn more.
- Wednesday - HogTalks, roughly once per month. We also sometimes schedule technical deep dives.
- Thursday - Meeting-free - no regularly scheduled internal meetings allowed. Learn more.
- Friday - These alternate between Sprint Planning and Life Stories.
No recurring meeting days (Tuesdays/Thursdays)
We try to keep these days focused on deep work. Therefore, we run no regularly scheduled 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.
Sprint planning
This is a longer 45min meeting every other Friday where we review the previous two week sprint and then outline what we want to achieve in the next 2 weeks. We split into Small Teams for this. Not all small teams follow this exact schedule, but you'll find they usually do these types of meetings on a Friday.
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.
Life stories
Alternating with Sprint Planning, Life Stories we hear from 1-2 members of the team who share a bit about themselves with us. No particular format - it's one of the few times a presentation makes sense! Each team member has up to 30min, inclusive of Q&A. These are a fun opportunity for us to get to know a bit about the people we work with, what cool things we didn't know about them, and whether or not they believe that pineapple belongs on pizza...
We schedule these several weeks in advance, but if you are unable to make your slot or would simply prefer not to participate, just let Charles or Eltje know - they are not mandatory!
HogTalks
HogTalks follows a casual interview format where we invite inspiring folks in our network to come tell us a bit about themselves. We'll usually dive into a specific topic that is relevant to what we are working on at PostHog (e.g. product strategy, company scaling, tech architecture). A member of the team will conduct the interview, before we open up to wider questions. We also record the content to release later as a podcast/video recording.