PostHog · Strategy · Mid · 45 to 60 minutes

Which customers should PostHog focus on?

PostHog is a platform that helps product teams analyze, test, and improve their software. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

Customer strategy
Research design
Prioritization
Cross functional thinking

The situation

The founder and go to market leads have asked you for a recommendation on who PostHog should treat as its ideal customer profile for the next planning cycle. Interest is coming from a wide range of users, from small product teams trying a self serve tool to larger software companies considering broader adoption. That breadth is creating friction. Product debates keep circling because different teams imagine different target users, marketing messages are trying to speak to everyone, pricing conversations are being pulled in opposite directions, and feature requests from prospects are hard to compare. There is pressure to move quickly because the company needs a clearer point of view before making near term product and commercial decisions. At the same time, the team cannot afford a long research project or a major repositioning based on weak evidence. Your job is to propose a practical way to define a clear ICP and show how that choice would guide roadmap, messaging, and pricing. The hard part is balancing speed with rigor while avoiding a profile that is too narrow to support growth or too broad to help day to day decisions.

What to produce

Write a 1 to 2 page strategy memo, 700 to 900 words.

Your answer must

Recommend a process for defining PostHog's ICP, including the key customer attributes and decision criteria you would use.
Prioritize the evidence you would gather first, and explain how you would learn from current customers, active prospects, and people or teams that evaluated PostHog but did not buy.
Propose a draft ICP hypothesis with clear inclusion criteria and at least two explicit exclusion criteria.
Show how the proposed ICP would change one messaging choice, one pricing choice, and one feature prioritization choice in the next planning cycle.
Include a short execution plan with stakeholders, timeline, and the signals you would track to confirm or revise the ICP.

Constraints

Use existing product, founder, and go to market capacity only, no new team or major new tooling.
Your recommendation must be actionable before the next planning cycle, without waiting for a long quantitative study.
Base your plan on evidence PostHog could realistically gather from existing customer, prospect, and sales interactions.
Do not assume PostHog can serve every customer segment equally well in the near term.

Format

Use headings such as problem, ICP hypothesis, evidence plan, business implications, and validation plan.

How PostHog actually played it

PostHog describes the ICP exercise that it says drove revenue growth, including tracking bad customers who did not buy and interviewing five reference customers. The ICP shaped messaging, pricing and feature choices. Valuable for PMs who need a concrete method to define their target user.

Study the customers who did not buy, not just the ones who did
Use five reference customers to ground the profile
An explicit ICP speeds up everyday decisions

Built from How we found our Ideal Customer Profile by James Hawkins.