Wrestling with PostHog's source of truth

[kevan-gilbert]

It's right in our handbook, straight out of the gate, as one of our key strategy pillars: "Be the source of truth for customer and product data"

And yet, it's seems as if we are not our own source of truth. Data about our customers and users exists in:

• PostHog
• Customer.io
• Zendesk
• Zapier
• Salesforce
• GitHub
• Spreadsheets
• Slack integrations
• A cyberspace vortex only "ask Max" can help us with

Is this a problem? My sense is yes, but this is a new joiner talking. Maybe it gets simpler:

• It feels uncomfortable that we're not being true to our own promise/strategy.
• It's very inefficient and hard to follow (at least, so far), in the employee experience.
• I sense we're missing opportunity. Feels like it ends up with the risk of nut treating users well, and things falling through the cracks: support tickets, sales, customer care, product marketing and product usage...seems ideal for them to be really synced up with one another.

What can we do to address this?
Ideally, we can use the PostHog app itself to build this.

• Does a new Small Team get made to go after this?
• Is this the CRM feature in the roadmap?
• Is this a Hackathon focus area?
• Can this be done via hard work on a dashboard in the app?
• Is it better to abandon this as a strategic pillar, and embrace the multi-platform chaos? Am I creating a problem out of nothing, where there is no worry at all?

What can I personally do to try and address this?

• I can experiment with Dashboards to see how far I can get
• I can create a project and try to rustle up some multi-team energy and momentum
• I can let this go?

[kevan-gilbert]

Okay. I've got some updates for myself.

First, all of the data we need is in Vitally. That's the Source of Truth for PostHog.

Second, this is a screencast of me trying to build a dashboard in PostHog to make it happen, which includes giving up on Max AI, shifting to ClaudeAI, then realizing I have no idea how to make it happen. If anyone would like a miserable view into a new user's attempts to figure out Dashboard-creation...this exists: https://drive.google.com/file/d/106OahUglF2QGRmDRKGrLI-tjxEVOW1Un/view?usp=sharing

[joethreepwood]

And yet, it's seems as if we are not our own source of truth. Data about our customers and users exists in:

Probably just from a vibe POV, worth clarifying that all of this data does mostly exist in PostHog still.

Customer.io, for example, just pulls info from PostHog, as does Safesforce for the most part. This is on me in the sense that I've shown you a bunch of spreadsheet stuff -- but a lot of that is just shortcuts that are easier to digest. Zendesk, too, is separated from PostHog but we do sync in info using the data warehouse.

Basically: PostHog probably is the source of the truth on the whole, but maybe that info you're looking for is a bit buried.

What can we do to address this? Ideally, we can use the PostHog app itself to build this.

• Does a new Small Team get made to go after this?

This probably sits between Data Warehouse, CDP and Analytics team right now in terms of tailoring it.

• Is this a Hackathon focus area?

Could be!

What can I personally do to try and address this?

Dashboard templates may be helpful!

[kevan-gilbert]

This was a helpful learning thread for me; I'll continue my work in the Dashboards issue: #271