PostHog's unique approach to product marketing

Marketing Lead, Joe Martin, on hiring weirdos, skipping battlecards, and treating management as a punishment

There’s no set way of running a product marketing team. Every business does it slightly differently, and the best teams adapt to that - they reflect the needs and shape of the company rather than being constrained by frameworks.

I’ve come across PostHog’s marketing a number of times over the past couple of years, and it’s always stood out. It’s a company that does things differently - and it’s clearly a marketing team that’s having a lot of fun doing it. Their homepage doesn’t look like anything else in B2B. The consistency of execution, the novel approach to storytelling - you can tell there’s real thought going into how product marketing works at PostHog.

So I sat down with their Marketing Lead, Joe Martin, to ask how that approach evolved, how he thinks about the function, and how his team is keeping up with the pace of change. There’s a lot here for any PMM leader trying to build a team that can keep pace with how quickly products, markets, and expectations are shifting.

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You’ve gone from product marketer to marketing lead. Has that changed how you see the function?

I think of my role as being someone who works on interesting challenges. That hasn’t changed now that I’m in a Team Lead, because hiring and growing a team is a really interesting set of challenges!

But management at PostHog is different than most companies. I’ve been in companies where I spent all day in leadership meetings, dealing with exec stakeholders, arguing with HR about car parking spaces. At Posthog though, team leads still have to do IC work. They just take responsibility for the team too.

That was a big part of the appeal - I wanted to stay close to doing the interesting work myself.

Do you think that expectation of leaders still doing IC work is a broader trend?

I hope so. AI is part of what’s driving it. Even as a product marketer, I can ship code and ship products now. There’s no excuse to just be doing management stuff when it’s so easy to ship things. That’s happening across all roles, not just marketing.

How do you structure the PMM team across such a broad product?

Each PMM owns a broad theme - AI, Observability, Data, Growth - rather than a specific product. We ship so fast that broad themes work better than specifically owned tools. We discovered this organically as the product stacks grew.

One thing we’ve learned is it works best when a product marketer has a product manager to work with. Having a PM on a product is an internal signal of product-market fit - it means something is ready for dedicated marketing support. It also gives us a hiring signal: new PM, probably need a new PMM.

What happens when work doesn’t fit those buckets?

We give ourselves permission to reject work. We’re a support team to engineers. If someone comes to us with a huge launch in two days, we’re not going to make other things suffer for something that hasn’t come in with enough notice.

You’ve been vocal about what product marketing shouldn’t include - no press releases, no battlecards. What got you there?

Two sides. One: I’m describing what works for us. Press releases don’t fit our brand and have never been productive, so they’re off the table.

The other side is that product marketing is full of people on LinkedIn trying to make it sound more complicated than it needs to be. We like building and shipping, so we focus on actually doing the work. As soon as someone starts talking very high-level about messaging and positioning, my reaction is: what does that really mean? I’ve been in teams where positioning means someone goes away to a magic quadrant, thinks about where we fit on a graph, and that becomes an internal document they spend six months talking about. It never surfaces into anything for a user.

You start with the email for every launch. Why?

It’s the shortest and the most intrusive channel, which forces clarity. But I often actually start with the visual - what’s the hook going to look like? Is there a meme, an illustration, an animation? Once you have that creative hook, then you get into making it resonant and interesting. Those assets get reused across social and the website, so the email is really the creative starting point for everything.

Cleo, who leads our AI product marketing, is great at this. She comes from an art background and creates her own art - she’s often prototyping things and getting feedback from developers and designers in ways that most product marketers wouldn’t think to do.

Are frameworks useless then?

Not at all - they’re tools in the toolbox. But you don’t need every tool for every job. Our newest PMM, Lizzie, is learning the data stack area, so she’s building out personas and messaging documents. Frameworks are useful at that stage. But when I work on a launch, I’m not thinking about a three-tier positioning framework. I’m thinking: how do I make this interesting and funny? What would the developer care about? And I follow that thread.

You hire for taste, opinions, and bravery. How do you screen for that?

Everyone says they’re honest and transparent - those are virtues. The way I think about it is: we look for weirdos. People who come from an opinionated position, even if we think they might be wrong, with a different mindset but the same sense of taste.

The most important question I ask in interviews is: of all the projects you’ve ever worked on, which was your favourite? Not the most successful or the highest ARR - the one you wish every project could be like. I want to see what excites people, what motivated them. As a former journalist, the thing I keep coming back to is: if you let people, they can’t help but tell you who they are.

Tell me about the super day.

It’s the final round in a four-stage process. Instead of a take-home task where someone loses their weekend and we get no insight into how they worked, we do a paid, simulated day’s work. We set them up on Slack with a kickoff call and tasks throughout the day so we can work alongside them - see what feedback they ask for, how they respond to it.

The range is fascinating. I’ve seen 45-page documents for a simple task, and I’ve seen someone spend hours on one rabbit hole to understand a single persona detail that affects one sentence in an email. They produce almost nothing - but that sentence is perfect.

We’ll do about a dozen super days before making an offer. About one percent of applicants get that far (and 0.4% of applicants get hired)

How important is technical knowledge versus craft?

We learned this the hard way. We went through a period where we overcorrected and spent about four months trying to find former software engineers who had become product marketers. That was such a specific thing to look for - very difficult, and ultimately not what mattered. We came back to screening for taste, brand awareness, and craft. We can teach someone the technical details fairly easily. It’s much harder to teach someone what feels right and what doesn’t, what passes the sniff test.

AI is accelerating this. It’s easy now to get a tool to spit out a one-pager or a landing page. The value isn’t in understanding the technical detail - the tool does that. It’s in knowing that something doesn’t sound quite right. Having that sense of taste: this is right, this is wrong, I want this to be weirder.

Ultimately we want our product marketers to feel like they’re basically the CMO of their own startup within the startup. However you think it should be done is the way it should be done. Don’t ask for permission. Just go do the thing.

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Joe Martin is the Marketing Lead at PostHog. He previously worked as a tech journalist and has been at PostHog for five years, building teams across customer support, events, graphics, and product marketing. PostHog is currently hiring product marketers.