Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Add long term vision to team page #4516

Merged
merged 10 commits into from
Nov 10, 2022
28 changes: 28 additions & 0 deletions contents/handbook/small-teams/experimentation/index.mdx
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -82,3 +82,31 @@ hideAnchor: false

## Feature ownership
You can find out more about the features we own [here](/handbook/engineering/feature-ownership)

## Long term vision

Imagine Alice is a product manager, and Bob is an engineer, both of whom love using PostHog.

During their weekly growth review, Posthog shows them that one of their workflows is performing 50% worse than other SaaS companies with a similar flow. They decide to build a new feature together, but they're unsure of the impact, so Alice & Bob decide to gate the feature via a feature flag.

lharries marked this conversation as resolved.
Show resolved Hide resolved
Bob runs the PostHog CLI, which automatically converts his branch to a feature flagged version. Alice then sets up auto-rollback on this feature flag using the PostHog UI: If their conversion metric falls more than 20%, the feature must be automatically rolled back.
neilkakkar marked this conversation as resolved.
Show resolved Hide resolved
lharries marked this conversation as resolved.
Show resolved Hide resolved

Bob builds the feature and runs the PostHog CLI, automatically converting his feature branch to a feature-flagged version. During creation, he selects the team template they normally use, called "Autorollout based on conversion metric", using the conversion metric that Posthog suggests. The feature progressively rolls out to internal users, then to beta users, then to remaining users. If their conversion metric falls by more than 20% the feature automatically rolls back and alerts their team. Bob requests a feature flag review from Alice.

Alice checks the Posthog UI and because it's such an important feature - adds a safety condition for Sentry errors increasing by 30% and a few counter metrics. This should result in an automatic rollback as well. Alice starts the experiment.

Thankfully, nothing goes wrong when the feature is rolled out. The team is disappointed that the feature doesn't seem to move any of the core company metrics, however. This doesn't fit into either of Bob's or Alice's model, so they dig deeper why this was the case.

Before they even start, PostHog automatically does some impact analysis on their core metrics, and generates some insights into what properties are highly correlated with conversion & which aren't.

As it turns out, people in USA and India love their new feature and show a 40% increase in conversion. Other countries, especially the UK, seem to dislike it so much that it negatively affects conversion. In the end, these forces balance out, leading to similar total conversion rates.

They suspect it might have something to do with their positioning in other countries, so they run a marketing experiment using PostHog, where PostHog automatically generates recommended copy text to try out. It generates 5 variants, and they test these in all countries.

As it turns out, copy wasn't the issue, and there's no significant change here. They watch a few recordings from the experiment to confirm there's nothing off here.

Since it's not a positioning issue, Alice & Bob decide that it makes sense to introduce some personalisation, and let people opt-in to the new feature, and have it on by default for USA and India. They can customise this right from the feature flag, and set this up such that any users who opt-in on their UI automatically get the flag.

PostHog keeps analysing metrics for this flag over time, and notifies Alice and Bob when their customers behaviour change. For example, if the conversion for users in UK has taken a turn for the better, or if enterprise customers have taken a turn for the worse.
lharries marked this conversation as resolved.
Show resolved Hide resolved

Our long term vision is to make all of this possible.