PostHog (https://posthog.com) has a marketing team of five people. The engineering org they serve is thirty teams across sixteen products. From the outside it looks like a plan. Joe Black, who leads that marketing team, says the inside is mostly chaos — and that's the part he likes.
Ghonche and Paul talk with Joe about treating marketing as code: every campaign and every proposal lives in GitHub as an issue, an RFC or a pull request. On day one he was asked to ship a blog post as a PR — at that point his GitHub experience was downloading a video game mod. Five years later he can't imagine working any other way.
We also get into what PostHog publishes: the handbook, the strategy, the compensation bands, and Joe's own 360 feedback, sitting in a public repo for anyone to read. Where does that start to hurt? And what should a young startup copy from it — and what definitely not?
Plus: hiring for a high ceiling instead of a high floor, the paid Super Day, why feedback should always be heard but not always followed, the billboard campaign Joe argued against and lost, the repositioning toward self-driving software, and what he thinks creative teams should keep their hands on when anything can be generated.
Follow Joe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joemartinwords/
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