Request: Make Role a required field at sign-up

[joethreepwood]

There's been some recent discussion about this within the CS & Sales team, so I'm creating an issue to centralize discussion and so Growth and Website & Docs teams can weigh in on this.

Short version: We'd like to set the Role field to be required at sign-up.

Why do this?

There are a few reasons.

1. From a Marketing perspective, this is one of the most actionable pieces of information we can have about a user. We can use it to assess the technical ability of the user. This impacts the level of information we give them in the onboarding emails after signup, and has previously impacted automated invites to the Product for Engineers newsletter. If we know a users' role then we can in the future tailor content to them more, such as inviting Founders to the Startups program, or sharing basic tutorials with Marketers and PMs.

2. From a user perspective, this means we can give them better information, and a better experience.

3. From a Marketing perspective, it's a strong signal of whether we are reaching the right users and can help us gauge the effectiveness of our work with less guesswork. We can combine Role information with Where did you hear about PostHog? to get a clearer view of where our audience are.

4. From a CS perspective, role is also one of the most important ICP signals. It has a 0-6 swing in scoring and can help the team decide, for example, the best way to assist or demo to a user.

5. Having user information can help validate Clearbit. Currently, Clearbit seems to have a lot of inaccuracies or to surface irrelevant information. E.g. A user signs up with a Gmail and lists themselves as a founder, but Clearbit insists they are an Engineer at a public company. Clearbit may be right, but that's not matching the user's usecase. If we have more user info, we can validate Clearbit better.

6. ICP scoring isn't currently serving the CS team very well in that they want to talk to larger teams. As we prepare to move to Salesforce we're discussing introducing a Lead scoring system that will assist them in this. Role would be a helpful metric in this.

Why not do this?

There's really only two reasons not to do this.

1. It feels 'Enterprisey' to do this. Others have pointed out that Amplitude, etc, do this and that it isn't PostHoggy to ask a question like this, or that engineers won't like this.

2. It adds user friction. Others have asserted that this could slow down sign-up rate or otherwise impact sign-ups.

I don't personally believe these should be blocking issues, because...

1. We ask this question at the moment anyway, so if the worry is that this question damages our brand then we're already taking most of that damage without getting the full benefit.

2. Previous assumptions about engineer marketing haven't always been true. We thought users would respond poorly to email marketing, yet onboarding emails perform well. If we think users don't want to share this information then we can mitigate that with a 'Rather not say' field and use that to judge.

3. A single drop-down field adds minimal friction compared to the value we could get out of it.

[andyvan-ph]

I think this is a no brainer. Like you say, it adds minimal friction, especially given it's happens after a user has already committed to signing up. If someone genuinely doesn't want to answer this question, I can't imagine they were that committed to using the product in the first place.

I can't put my hands on the info now, but asking these kinds of questions can have a positive effect if the user perceives they're getting a more customized experience based on who they are.

Anyway, we should do this.

[charlescook-ph]

Others

It is I, I am the aforementioned Others! (Unless someone else raised the exact same points at me - possible, my points are often deeply compelling and often copied.)

I don't mind going with this if, um, others outside marketing aren't worried - disagree and commit etc etc.

[joethreepwood]

Signup is usually owned by growth, so I think @raquelmsmith gets the ultimate decision here!

[corywatilo]

Can we move this to an onboarding step in-app? Like, "Let's personalize PostHog for you".

B2B apps are generally less susceptible to the whims of B2C users (meaning yes, higher intent = more likely to fill out the form) but it doesn't negate the fact that it's still obnoxious to the end user, especially with our type of users.

Not opposed to having this somewhere (as we do today) but still don't think marketing is the most important facet of the company where perfect marketing attribution (at this stage in a customer's journey) should trump every other factor.

[joethreepwood]

Disagree that this is obnoxious, but that solution would work for me

[raquelmsmith]

Putting it in onboarding would be good. Not going to do that now though. Can we make it funny to make it not so lame? Eg for the "other" role, call it "Some other cool job" or "Something else super exciting"

We can also run an a/b test on this just to verify it doesn't actually prevent signups.

[joethreepwood]

Putting it in onboarding would be good. Not going to do that now though. Can we make it funny to make it not so lame? Eg for the "other" role, call it "Some other cool job" or "Something else super exciting"

We can also run an a/b test on this just to verify it doesn't actually prevent signups.

Fine with me. Can we also cut the Leadership role out? I think there's ambiguity and overlap there, which was discussed on an old issue. We may want to cut the Data role too? We could probably just optimize to the below and have a custom designed hog for each one so make it more fun.

---

What do you do?
Help us make sure we give you the right info.

• Founder / Leadership
• Engineer / Data
• Product Management
• Marketing / Sales
• Some other cool job

[andyvan-ph]

What do you do? Help us make sure we give you the right info.

• Founder / Leadership
• Engineer / Data
• Product Management
• Marketing / Sales
• Some other cool job

• Strong opinion: Just remove "leadership" altogether. We're more interested in their function, not their seniority – i.e. we don't want a head of marketing clicking "leadership". We could use "Exec" if we wanted to be more precise, as that implies more seniority than just "I manage a team".

• Nice-to-have would be to separate software engineering from data and growth roles, but I think that would be obnoxious / too many options at this stage. If / when we move this to onboarding, it would be good to explore more granular options for personlization.

[joethreepwood]

Yeah, I want the Leadership option gone and this list to be as short as possible.

[Twixes]

One tiny fly-by note: Let's make sure this is a good experience for hobbyists/students too! It's annoying when you want to sign up for something personally because of a side project and suddenly have to classify yourself as company Foo, role X.