This started the way most rabbit holes start: browsing Instagram for remote problem-solving roles, I bumped into a job post. I clicked through — and stayed on the company’s site far longer than any application process justifies. It didn’t look like other careers pages. It was playful, confident, and built with a level of care that made me curious about the people behind it. The company was PostHog — the product analytics tool.
Then I found out the entire website is open source. I’d come for a job post and left with a masterclass. I happened to be rebuilding my own portfolio at the time, and how their site is put together changed what I think a website — and by extension, any customer-facing artifact — is for.
1. Craft is a trust signal
PostHog’s site sweats details most companies reserve for the product: the typography, the jokes in the margins, the sense that a human decided everything on purpose. The message it sends is simple: if this team cares this much about a page you’ll visit once, imagine how they treat the product you rely on daily. Support works the same way. The follow-up email nobody demanded, the update that arrives before the customer asks — same move, different medium. Details are how you tell a team that cares from a team that copes.
2. Transparency compounds
The openness doesn’t stop at the site. Their company handbook is public too — strategy, decisions, how they work. By the time I thought about applying, most of the questions a candidate usually has to dig for had already answered themselves. There’s a support lesson in that as well: most customer frustration isn’t caused by problems, it’s caused by not knowing what’s happening. Every published explanation — a status page, a known-issue note, an honest post-mortem — is a ticket that never has to be written.
3. A job post is a product demo
I came for a role and stayed for the website. That’s the quiet power of getting the details right: the application started long before I ever saw a form. It’s also the standard I hold my own work to now — this portfolio exists because a job post made me curious, and curiosity is what happens when craft does its job.
That’s the job I want in one sentence: be the person who notices the details before the customer has to.