How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk)
Ben Williams, VP of Product at Snyk, discusses Snyk's journey from product-led growth to product-led sales, detailing how they acquired early users, overcame monetization challenges, and structured their growth and product teams. He shares insights on freemium strategy, activation, and building effective growth organizations.
Deep Dive Analysis
18 Topic Outline
Ben Williams' Career Path and Specialization
Snyk's Mission, Scale, and Market Disruption
Snyk's Early Growth: First 100 Node.js Users
Leveraging Developer Conferences and Meetups
Key Product-Led Growth Loops: GitHub, Snyk Advisor
Snyk's Initial Self-Serve Monetization Challenges
Winning Developer Hearts and Minds
Evolution of Snyk's Growth Team and Structure
Decision Science and Embedded Growth Marketers
Advice for Building High-Performing Growth Teams
Ben's Vision and Mission Framework
Growth Strategy: Loop-Based Model and Constraints
Importance of Trustworthy Data in Growth
Socializing Learnings and Experiment Results
Snyk's Product Organization Structure
Freemium vs. Paid Features and Trial Strategies
Defining Team Activation Milestones at Snyk
Essential Tools for Snyk's Growth Team
7 Key Concepts
Developer-First Security
An approach to application security that empowers developers to own security by providing better, less friction-filled tools integrated into their workflows, rather than traditional top-down, audit-focused methods that slow them down.
Company-Generated, Company-Distributed Content Loop
A growth mechanism where the company's product automatically creates and distributes valuable content that attracts new users and re-engages existing ones, such as Snyk's GitHub pull requests or Snyk Advisor pages for open-source packages.
Decision Science
A function focused on applying deep data analysis and predictive models to build in-product experiences and help teams make better, more informed decisions, going beyond basic business intelligence to drive actionable insights.
Vision and Mission Framework
A structured approach where a 'vision' defines a 5-10 year aspirational, product-agnostic future state for users, and a 'mission' describes the fundamental, differentiating approach to incrementally achieve that vision, outlining what will be done and how.
Learnings as Path to Impact
The philosophy that experimentation's primary goal is to generate actionable insights and knowledge that the organization can leverage to achieve desired outcomes, rather than solely focusing on immediate metric changes, paving the way for future impact.
Product-Driven Revenue
A metric that accounts for all revenue from customers who showed meaningful value-based activity in the product before any sales contact, indicating the efficiency of the company's product-led growth across all revenue channels, including self-serve and sales-led.
Team Activation (Snyk's Definition)
For Snyk, team activation is defined as the habit moment where a team consistently derives core value by fixing vulnerabilities within 30 days of team creation, which has a strong correlation with three-month retention.
7 Questions Answered
Snyk's founders engaged deeply with the Node.js developer community, presenting at conferences and meetups, and posing the question of whether developers had known vulnerabilities in their apps, with Snyk providing the solution.
Snyk's early self-serve monetization only gained traction with individual developers, failing to convert larger companies due to a lack of enterprise-grade governance features and broader language support needed by security teams.
Companies must solve a real problem developers care about, make the solution as painless as possible by integrating with their existing tools, and take the product to them instead of pulling them out of their workflow.
Embedding growth marketers provides a broader range of ideas and a larger execution toolbox, enabling teams to test and learn faster with more parallel, aligned initiatives, sometimes without needing engineering resources for initial experiments.
A Vision describes a five to ten-year aspirational, product-agnostic future state for users, while a Mission outlines the fundamental, differentiating approach a company will take to incrementally achieve that vision.
Features that promote the growth model should generally be free, while those that add friction or have high service costs should be reserved for paid plans, with clear drivers for users to move between plans.
Snyk defines team activation as the habit moment where a team consistently derives core value by fixing vulnerabilities within 30 days of team creation, which has a strong correlation with three-month retention.
18 Actionable Insights
1. Define Vision and Mission
Establish a clear vision (nirvana state for users, agnostic of your company) and a mission (how you’ll relentlessly iterate to achieve that vision, encoding your unique advantage). This framework provides a guiding North Star for teams at every level.
2. Build Cross-Functional Growth Teams
Structure growth teams to be truly cross-functional, including engineers, PMs, designers, growth marketers, and decision scientists, all aligned around common objectives and KPIs. This resolves misaligned incentives and provides a broader palette of ideas and execution capabilities.
3. Invest Early in Data Infrastructure
Prioritize investment in data infrastructure, tooling, and dedicated people from the outset to ensure data informs critical decisions. Focus on intentional collection and testing conformance to schema to build absolute confidence and trustworthiness in your behavioral data.
4. Develop Loop-Based Growth Strategy
Articulate your growth strategy using a loop-based model to identify micro and macro loops, understand their connections, and document them qualitatively. Augment this with quantitative data to guide quarter-to-quarter focus and intentional investment, ensuring you address the biggest constraints to growth.
5. Foster Rapid Learning Cadence
Facilitate a rapid learning cadence within your growth teams by documenting learnings from data exploration, experimentation, and user research. Socialize these learnings widely and visibly across the organization to ensure they are leveraged effectively to drive outcomes.
6. Win Developer Hearts and Minds
To gain developer adoption, solve a problem they deeply care about and make their job as painless as possible. Meet developers where they are by integrating with their existing tools and workflows, taking your product to them rather than pulling them out of their flow.
7. Formalize Growth Team & Process
Formalize the notion of a dedicated growth team and establish well-understood, documented growth processes, practices, and working cadences. This ensures growth efforts are coordinated and effective, especially as the organization scales.
8. Define Activation Milestones Rigorously
Define activation as the point where a team forms a habit around deriving core value from your product, not just logging in. Use extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify the ‘habit moment’ that most strongly correlates with improved long-term retention.
9. Strategically Design Freemium & Paid Plans
Place features that promote your growth model into the free tier, while reserving cost-prohibitive or friction-adding features for paid plans. Clearly define target customers and use cases for each plan, mapping out the motivations that drive users from one plan to the next (e.g., governance needs for business-critical code).
10. Embed Growth Marketers in Product Teams
Integrate growth marketers directly into cross-functional product teams to broaden the palette of ideas and expand execution capabilities. This allows for faster testing and learning, with marketers able to execute high-impact initiatives (e.g., SEO-optimized pages) without solely relying on engineering resources.
11. Utilize Programmatic Content Loops
Design company-generated, company-distributed content loops that drive both acquisition and engagement. Examples include automatically creating branded pull requests on GitHub to fix vulnerabilities or building programmatic SEO assets like ‘package health scores’ to attract users searching for related information.
12. Identify Right-Fit Growth Team Members
When building a growth team, identify individuals who thrive in a fast-paced, iterative environment, are motivated by measurable impact, embrace imperfection, and are curious about user needs. Ensure team members are equipped with the right skills and mindset for growth contexts.
13. Start Simple with Experimentation
When introducing experimentation, begin with simple A/B tests and fundamental concepts, gradually introducing more complex methods as teams build experience. Avoid overwhelming new teams with advanced techniques like multivariate testing or sequential sampling, which can lead to mistakes and frustration.
14. Socialize Learnings Widely
Implement ceremonies like ‘Impact and Learnings Reviews’ at team and group levels to continuously document, discuss, and share insights from experiments, data exploration, and user research. This ensures learnings, even from failures, are leveraged across the entire organization to inform future decisions and uplevel other teams.
15. Continuously Revisit Monetization Model
Regularly challenge assumptions about your freemium, trial, and paid plan models to ensure they remain optimal for current and future growth. Consider dynamic trial lengths based on usage or customer segment, and explore how changes might impact your overall growth model and product-led sales efficiency.
16. Track Product-Driven Revenue
Implement a metric for ‘product-driven revenue’ to account for all revenue from customers who showed meaningful value-based activity in the product before any sales contact. This provides insight into the PLG efficiency across all revenue channels and highlights the higher net retention of product-driven cohorts.
17. Leverage Key SaaS Tools for Growth
Utilize essential SaaS tools to power your growth efforts, such as Amplitude for analytics, Segment for data infrastructure, Full Story for session replays, UserInterviews.com or UserTesting.com for user research, Sprig for in-app surveys, and Airtable for managing experiment plans and knowledge bases.
18. Ask Insightful Interview Questions
Ask candidates questions that reveal self-awareness and alignment with company values, such as ‘Fast forward three years, what’s different about you then?’ to gauge personal growth, or ‘Tell me about your recent involvement in DEI&B initiatives’ to assess value alignment.
6 Key Quotes
If you search for Snyk in the Urban Dictionary, you'll see it's an acronym for so now you know.
Ben Williams
Flow is just this incredibly important concept for developers and you want to strive to keep them in that flow for as long as possible.
Ben Williams
Experimentation, it's not about delivering outcomes. It's about generating learnings that the organization can leverage effectively to deliver outcomes.
Ben Williams
The sad reality is that without good process, learnings easily end up unused and gathering dust. And you have to ask them, what was the point?
Ben Williams
If you try and focus on the impact itself, you might struggle. If you focus on the things you need in terms of learnings to take you step by step, that will pave the path to creating impact.
Ben Williams
You're never going to have a shortage of ideas in a high-performing growth team. So knowing where to focus amidst that kind of sea of ideas is a really important role of the strategy.
Ben Williams
3 Protocols
Vision and Mission Framework
Ben Williams- Define Vision: Identify the nirvana state for users/customers in 5-10 years, unbound by your company/product, and bound to your target market.
- Define Mission: Describe your fundamental approach and unique differentiating advantage to incrementally achieve the vision, answering 'what you will do and how you'll do it.'
- Apply at All Levels: Use this framework from the company level all the way down to individual teams.
Weekly Team Impact & Learnings Review
Ben Williams- Continuously Document Learnings: Teams document insights from data exploration, experimentation, and user research in a weekly impact and learnings document.
- Discuss Learnings: Most of the meeting is spent discussing documented learnings, their implications, and how they can be leveraged in follow-up work or other contexts.
- Review Key Metrics: A relatively smaller part of the meeting is also spent looking at key metrics (some teams split this out entirely).
- Exclude Activity Review: No time is spent reviewing what the team has actually been doing, focusing instead on outcomes and learnings.
Monthly Group Impact & Learnings Review
Ben Williams- Teams Share Key Learnings: All growth teams come together to share specific learnings that have potential relevance and utility across other teams.
- Include User Research Insights: The meeting includes a standing agenda item for the user research team to share 'developer insights.'
- Record and Socialize: The meeting is always recorded and socialized with the rest of the company afterwards to fan out information.