How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk)

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.