guidelines

A few thoughts as we've been building the twig brand...

dawn of invention

As grandiose as it sounds, the product reflects the discovery of fire, the start of human invention.

AI is changing how people work, dramatically. We should be willing to reflect this level of change.

We want This has practical implications:

  • No mascots
  • We should use expansive landscapes, expansive possibilities
  • AI first. If it isn't AI related, should it be part of PostHog (where data and complex visual settings live for ie the workflows product).

humans

To grow, standing out matters. We want to avoid the tech dystopia dark mode that others do - it's too obvious and therefore boring.

Others will market "stop hiring humans". We're much more "wake up later", or "see your kids grow up". The goal of what we're building is to make people far more productive. People will get more and more abstracted and high level - that's a good thing. LLMs are not enough to replace human creativity, problem solving, self-improvement, common sense and abstracted sense of the world. If you raised your kids by pinning open their eyes and having them watch youtube and read every word on the internet, they'd struggle too!

To be clear, we are not anti progress - we believe in AI and its ability to improve everyone's quality of life. It won't be perfect, and the future, like the past, will be unevenly distributed, but we believe in the benefits overall for humanity.

Emphasizing humans has implications for our voice.

  • Corporations are a veil. We should be the opposite - we should just be ourselves and not "mask".
  • Be ourselves. Say what we don’t know. Say what it doesn’t do.
  • Own mistakes
  • This should feel similar to how we worked before at PostHog. If anything we should be doing more of this with twig, because we're not putting a level of weirdness or funniness over the top.
  • Be concise. Use simple words. Say what you mean. Be direct - this is part of authenticity.

Remember, humans by software (at least today!), we're selling to them.

simple

Agents can now do things for people. This means that adding a lot of UX is an antipattern because agents should be doing the tasks.

We started with PostHog thinking it'd be like AWS - hundreds of products, all separate. AI changed this - it means you can use the products (and the mountains of multi-dimensional customer data) together to build a deep and wide, nuanced understanding of users, from which you can get automation right.

Implications:

  • no capital letters except for continuous prose (ie the handbook and docs).
  • in product, we are all in chat. we want to avoid extra windows, tabs and views. new capabilities should be widgets in the chat. posthog remains the place for clicking around and exploring in a non AI first way - it is our data cloud.