Platform Tips #30: Use Posthog to Improve Your Platform Developer Experience
How Posthog helps us to improve our Platform Developer Experience and how it can help you too!
Hey Folks 👋,
I'm Romaric, CEO of Qovery, and this is my 30th Platform Tips post.
Enhancing the developer experience (DevEx) ensures your engineering team uses your Internal Developer Platform. At Qovery, we have found Posthog, a robust product analytics tool, to be invaluable in achieving this. Here’s how we leverage Posthog to refine our platform and boost DevEx.
What is Posthog?
Posthog is a product analytics tool that provides insights into user behavior, helping teams understand and optimize their product usage. Its versatility makes it particularly useful for improving DevEx by offering detailed analytics and real-time feedback.
Why Consider Posthog?
Here’s why Posthog stands out and is worth considering to enhance DevEx.
Open Source and Self-Hosted
Posthog is an open-source tool with nearly 20,000 stars on GitHub, highlighting its popularity and active community. Being open-source offers several advantages like Transparency and Customization, but the most interesting one is the ability to Self-Host Posthog. Then all data remains within your infrastructure, adhering to your security and compliance requirements.
Full-Featured
Posthog is not just about analytics; it provides a comprehensive suite of tools that cater to various aspects of product development and user experience:
Behavioral Analytics: Gain deep insights into how users interact with your product.
Event Tracking: Monitor specific actions and events within your platform to understand user behavior better.
Session Recording: Watch actual user sessions to see how they navigate and use your product.
Feature Flagging: Predictively manage feature rollouts, testing new features with specific user segments before a wider release.
Surveys and Feedback: Collect direct feedback from users to make informed decisions.
This wide range of features makes Posthog a versatile tool that can address multiple facets of DevEx improvement.
Mature Product
Posthog is a mature product trusted by renowned companies like Airbus, DHL, and Mux. Its adoption by such notable organizations speaks volumes about its reliability and effectiveness. These companies rely on Posthog for its robust analytics and insightful data to drive their product development and user experience strategies.
Key Features of Posthog for Enhancing DevEx
Video Recording: Posthog’s video recording feature allows us to observe how developers interact with our platform. By watching these sessions, we can identify pain points and optimize workflows, ensuring a smoother experience.
Feature Flagging: This feature is essential for rolling out new functionalities safely. It enables us to deploy features to a subset of users, gather feedback, and make necessary adjustments before a full-scale release. This controlled approach minimizes disruptions and enhances stability.
Custom Data for Debugging: Posthog allows us to send custom data to track specific events and behaviors, especially useful when users interact with our CLI. This capability helps us debug issues more effectively and understand what’s happening in the background, leading to quicker problem resolution and a better user experience.
Surveys: Posthog’s survey tool is instrumental in collecting user quantitative feedback. By targeting specific segments, we can gather insights on particular aspects of our platform, enabling us to make data-driven decisions that resonate with our developer community. (At Qovery, we use Intercom Survey for historical reasons - but Posthog do perfectly well the job)
Conclusion
Understanding actual usage patterns is vital for improving the developer experience. Relying on assumptions can lead to misinformed decisions that may not address the actual needs of your users. Posthog allows us to base our improvements on concrete data, ensuring that we are enhancing the aspects of our platform that matter most to our developers.
If you are interested in Posthog: give it a shot or contact
/(ps: this is not a sponsored post)
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