Idea: Export definition library to knowledge-sharing tools

[joethreepwood]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

We've had a lot of internal discussion about the obscurity of events. It's obvious there's an issue there, which spills off into multiple issues which users experience:

• It's difficult for teams to onboard new team members when they have a large number of complex events
• It's often difficult to know which events are still being used or what their definition is
• It's easy for users to come to incorrect conclusions by misunderstanding event properties
• It's easy for users to assume that they cannot answer queries using PostHog if properties aren't clear or discoverable

These issues will inevitably become more pressing over time, because:

• Teams will experience churn in their teams and new users will become more common
• The number of events and properties a team tracks will only grow over time

We want to grow revenue and attract larger companies. We should consider that teams in these companies may already have systems set up to share knowledge internally - and that integrating with these systems would be valuable, would aid collaboration and be potentially simpler than building other functionality into PostHog to solve the issue (that's my non-engineer assumption anyway).

Describe the solution you'd like

The event and properties stats views currently give the best view of the relevant information, when used correctly. You can see a table of all the properties, tags, a description (if added) and you can click through to get some other useful info - especially: Owner and Modification Date.

How about a way to export this table so that teams can easily include it within their existing knowledge-sharing services?

My guess is that there's two ways to do this:

1. Quick and dirty: A simple export function that dumps the table into a spreadsheet or CSV that can be copy-pasted into existing tools. Probably simpler to make, but less valuable as it would need to be manually updated.
2. More sophisticated: Plugins that integrate with specific popular knowledge-sharing tools and update the table automatically. Probably harder to make, but better user experience.

Suggestions for platforms we should specifically integrate with: Confluence, Notion and Stack Overflow for Teams.

Describe alternatives you've considered

There are a number of suggested solutions already. Including ways to clear up events, making event/property definitions more visible and UI tweaks to make it easier to surface definition information when building queries. These are great ideas, but none of them easily integrate with existing systems may have for sharing knowledge.

Additional context

This idea came up after attending a MIxPanel Masters event (notes here), where the Senior Analytics Lead at TransferWise gave a talk about their data culture and how they work with other teams. One of the questions she was asked was about how they share knowledge with other teams.

Answer: They use Confluence quite heavily and the Analytics team maintains a library of event information they track. They also use Slack for sharing more ad-hoc stuff.

Could also be worth talking with Saga about this for their platform.

Thank you for your feature request – we love each and every one!

[paolodamico]

This is super helpful @joethreepwood. Just as an early discussion, I'm curious about the rationale of sharing this information outside of PostHog. I could argue that a reason to do this would be if PostHog doesn't provide this information in a friendly, fast and helpful way (same way you'd want to export data from a graph if you couldn't visualize it correctly in PH), and so the most sophisticated solution would be to build a super solid taxonomy support.

[joethreepwood]

You're right that it's definitely advantageous to solve this issue within PostHog as a first step. However, I can propose three reasons why an integration to maintain a library of definitions on an external platform would be useful:

1. If a team is already using a platform such as Confluence then they will view the ability to integrate with that as valuable.
2. If such a library already exists then an integration will mean that users can maintain a single source of truth more easily. They won't be in a position of having one set of definitions in PostHog and one set of outdated definitions in the existing library. Of course, they could retire the outdated version themselves, but what:
3. If a team is using multiple analytics platforms or tools simultaneously and needs to maintain a single library of event definitions and owners separately from any individual tool.

Situation 3 feels like the most compelling from a product point of view, as we already know that there are some users (e.g. Saga) using PostHog alongside other tools. The situation as described by the TransferWise analyst was similar: they have multiple analytics and data teams which use an array of tools. The Data team predominantly uses SQL to directly query the data (along with BI tools), while the Product/Conversion team uses MixPanel for other types of (mainly funnel) analysis.

[paolodamico]

Thanks for that context @joethreepwood, that's super helpful, and can see a solid use case for this. the only clarification I would do is that it'd be important to keep a continuous sync rather than a one-time export, as one-time exports will quickly get outdated.

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[posthog-bot]

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