“If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together”
This phrase will slowly kill your company and I’m here to prove it.
Imagine you are driving a car. It’s often useful to have someone give you directions, point out gas stations, and recommend stops for snacks. This is a helpful amount of collaboration.
An unhelpful amount of collaboration is getting out of your car to ask pedestrians if they like your car, swapping drivers every 10 minutes, or having someone constantly commenting on your driving.
In the first scenario, you get the right amount of feedback to get to your destination as fast as possible. In the second, you get more feedback, but it slows you down. You run the risk of not making it to the place you want to go.
The second scenario is also the one most startups (or companies, really) end up in because of ✨ collaboration ✨.
Being good at feedback means knowing when not to give it
As PostHog grows, I’ve seen more and more collaboration that doesn’t add value or adds far too little value for the time lost collaborating. So much so we made “collaboration sucks” the topic of the week during a recent company all hands.
“You’re the driver” is a key value for us at PostHog. We aim to hire people who are great at their jobs and get out of their way. No deadlines, minimal coordination, and no managers telling you what to do.
In return, we ask for extraordinarily high ownership and the ability to get a lot done by yourself. Marketers ship code, salespeople answer technical questions without backup, and product engineers work across the stack.
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