What Leo saw at PostHog, 2. The support queue that was a week out of date
PostHog aimed to answer paying customers in under 15 minutes, while their priority was set by hand once a week. Leo suggested setting it from billing. The weekly step went 158 days after the handbook Leo read.
We gave Leo PostHog's public handbook exactly as it stood on 31 December 2021, and nothing later.
PostHog had no part in this
We used PostHog's handbook because it is public and openly licensed (MIT, copyright PostHog Inc). PostHog did not take part, and nothing here is PostHog's view of Leo. Every quote below links back to PostHog's own pages and commits.
The claims, and where to check them
| Claim | Where to check it |
|---|---|
| Support was prioritised by how much a customer pays, and that tier was set by hand once a week from billing and sales data | PostHog's support hero page, 31 Dec 2021 (the page at that commit) |
| The handbook's own targets: under 15 minutes is great, under an hour is okay, over a day is too late | The same page |
| The weekly tagging went into the handbook on 5 November 2021 | PostHog's commit 6c017273 |
| It came out on 7 June 2022, when support moved to Zendesk with priority set by the customer's plan | PostHog's commit ca6cf7b3 |
The work as it was
PostHog answered support by priority: paying customers first, then subscribers, then the community. Its targets were sharp: under 15 minutes is great, under an hour is okay, over a day is too late.
But the priority itself was set by hand. "At the moment, [the operations lead] manually tags customers based on Stripe and HubSpot data once a week." So a customer who had just started paying could wait up to a week before the queue knew it, against a target measured in minutes.
What Leo saw
Leo joined the support page with the operations side, and saw a queue sorted in minutes from a list updated weekly.
The ways forward
- Improve: tag from the systems. Set each customer's tier straight from billing and sales, so a new paying customer is tagged the day they pay.
- Redesign: catch problems before customers report them. Run the cloud health checks continuously and alert the on call engineer.
- Redesign: answers become documents. When a good answer closes a conversation, it becomes a help page, so the next customer finds it themselves.
What happened next
- 7 June 2022. Support moved to Zendesk, priority came from the customer's plan, and the weekly hand tagging came out of the handbook: 158 days after the snapshot Leo read.
- 2025. A support engineer could see a customer's monthly revenue inside the ticket itself.
What this does not show
The handbook shows the weekly step going and priority moving into the support tool. It does not show exactly how Zendesk learns each customer's plan, or how response times changed.
Leo learns how a business really runs by reading what its people write and talking with them, lays out the ways the work could go, side by side, and keeps the choice with the people who make it. When they take a path, its card records it, including one Leo did not offer.