YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Williams

lines on the record: 96
first: 2022-11-06
most recent: 2022-11-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Thanks as to finding me. I'm a bit of a twit when it comes to Twitter. I generally spend a bit more. And in terms of how people can be useful to me, I'm starting to take on some additional clients in advisory capacity. So feel free to get in touch if you think I could help.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Firstly, I just want to say a big thanks for having me on, Lenny. I love talking about all this stuff and really appreciate you being willing to let me bend your ear a little bit as to finding me”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe I'll cheat on this one a bit too. And I'm not going to combine it to the when you say industry, I think security industry, but I'm going to look at the product domain and specifically product operations. And in my mind, there's not many people who know more in this area than Christine Itwaru at Pendo. So if you ever get a chance to talk with her, I know that would be a fun conversation. Many gems would be dropped, I think.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just generally throughout interviews, I'm looking for curiosity. So day to day, good PM as we'll be asking why as much as my six-year-old son does, which is a lot. So I'll try and discern that through the course of the conversation. So not really a question, but something I'm looking for. And then maybe I want to flip it because building on something that Adam Fishman was saying, his theme of evaluating the people dimension of folks, you're potentially going to work with when you're interviewing with a company. And this was a question I got asked myself recently by a candidate, which I just thought was brilliant. And that was, tell me about the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives that you've recently personally been involved with. It just felt like a really great way for them to be able to test alignment of their personal values with those of someone they'd be working with really closely. So I love that.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple here if it's not cheating too much. First is one I like to ask when hiring for anyone actually really. It's fast forward three years, what's different about you then? A lot of people will default to telling you where they aspire to be in terms of role or title. But what I'm really looking for is signals of humility, of self-awareness around areas of personal and professional growth. No, people who can be open about where they think they need to work on to grow themselves as people. I love that. Also,”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A movie turning red on Disney, which we love watching with our kids, it was just fun. TV show, the most recent curb season, had me in tears as usual.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to pick a couple that I've enjoyed reading in recent months. So for product and growth geeks like me, or in fact anyone with more than a passing interest in data, I'll recommend how to measure anything by Douglas Hubbard. Second up, you had Marty Kagan on, and he mentioned the book Sprint by Jake Knapp and John Zaratsky. And I love that book. But personally, there make time book. It was something that radically changed my relationship with information. And I recommend that to all-time staff, product people out there. And for number three, I'm going to say, this is how they tell me the world ends by Nicole Pearlroth, which gives an amazing view into the world of digital espionage.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At table. In fact, Airtable for growth and product is just so flexible. You can do anything. And in fact, if we think about growth, I should have mentioned that first because that's where we keep most of our experiment plans and knowledge base and our user research base.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is comparable to usertesting.com. Both of them are amazing services in terms of getting fast, curated access to individuals to participate in user research. Sprigg is another one. So Sprig is a fantastic kind of in-app survey platform, which is what we primarily use it for, but it also does a bunch of other cool stuff in terms of being able to test UX designs as well in app. How many have I said?”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I'm going to say amplitude, first of all. Segment as a means to be able to get our data from the products to amplitude and to everywhere else that cares about it, whether that be a kind of downstream BI system, Snowflake and Looker on top of that or system marketing automation systems like Marketo and stuff like that. I'd say amplitude. I will next say full story. You know, absolutely fantastic for Of session replays, of course, and kind of it bridges that gap between Qual and Quant, right? I would say userinters.com.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Identifying the corpus owners and their use cases, different roles of different users within the team-based activation journey, defining our retention metric, which is still fixing, so whether a team is fixed, along with natural usage behavior and expected natural usage frequency. And then we found the habit moment that ultimately most strongly correlated with improved long-term retention and most of kind of the numbers side of things came out of our MLOps platform. But after that, we then worked back to figure out that's the habit moment, that's what we see is activation, but there's a set of steps that teams need to get there. So what's the aha moment? Before that, what's the setup moment? And what are the individual steps that a team needs to go through to reach that setup moment? So yeah, that's the overall process. And ultimately, it's a really strong model that allows us then to feed in the set of user levels.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's it. So there absolutely was a decision scientist involved, thankfully. We had to collect a lot of baseline data first. So after we built out the data platform, we needed actually to wait a bit to build a good data set. We did a huge amount of quantum analysis, a lot of Splunking of the data, applying ML models along with a bunch of supporting call research as well. But we started really with”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we can't explicitly measure it at the user level. So, in the activation process, we have set up moments, our ha moments and habit moments. And our habit moment that we define as a team being activated, it's related to fixing vulnerabilities within 30 days of team creation. And the reason that is chosen, it's because there is a significant correlation with downstream and in that case with activation, three month retention and retention again based on, again, not just coming back and logging in, but still fixing. So teams that fix a vulnerability within their first 30 days are much, much more likely to still be fixing three months later.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, what is activation? So for us, activation is indicative of the team forming a habit around the usage of SNEC. And when I say the usage, I actually mean deriving core value, which is ultimately fixing vulnerabilities. It's not just logging in, right? It's not even just finding vulnerabilities. It's fixing vulnerabilities. So building a habit around that. And the reason I say team instead of using is, and we actually base most of our definitions of activation engagement around teams, which is really important because ultimately security is a team sport. That team might be one person, in which case the user is equivalent to team, but often a team is multiple people. And we actually expect different people to fulfill different parts of the team activation journey. We also want to enumerate aggregate level activity around fix that sometimes off-platform.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say surprise me per se, but it's something that I think has, it's perhaps obvious in retrospect, and that is that companies of different sizes, of different complexities, of different industries from those that are very highly regulated to the other end of the spectrum, they're going to take... Different lengths of time to need to evaluate properly. So being able to cater for those in some way, whether it might be dynamic trial lengths or whether it be trial lengths that are based on usage, things like that, I think that it becomes really important. That's something to be thinking about for sure.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which basically accounts for all revenue customers where we saw meaningful value based activity in the product before there was any sales contact. And that really tells actually a super interesting story about the PLG efficiency of your company across all revenue channels, self-serve and sales-led. And what's fascinating there is that the product-driven cohort contribute a relatively greater amount to net retention. So when you think about packaging, you know, you really need to think about and understand that macro level contribution of the freemium motion and know what you're trying to optimize for, kind of balancing revenue today versus potential future revenue.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to think about the plan design and those motions across both aspects of PLG and the sales-led motion. When you have a strong PLG foundation that is inclusive of a product-led sales motion, you're going to be in a really powerful position from the perspective of having a significant volume of highly qualified leads that are coming from the product. We actually track a metric that we call product-driven revenue.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making those changes impact our growth model. It's not always easy to answer those questions, but I think there are some ways that you could help test there. For example, you might cohort child users and teams who have low engagement and don't convert during the trial. And then when the trial ends, drop them back into a new enhanced freak plan and monitor engagement there. So there's some things you do, but I think that habit of continuously challenging yourselves and reevaluating whether the model, the specific delineations between the plans and how you support evaluation and the motion between those plans, I think is really important to do that. And also when it comes to PLG and sales, we talked about the self-serve motion, obviously it's big and important for SNEC, but the sales led motion critical as well. Significantly impactful.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting dimension is how you approach trials. Like with most things, I think we're still figuring that out at Sneak. I don't know that there's ever a perfect answer or even a correct answer here. Certainly different from product to product. We have a self-serve child to support time boxed evaluation of some of the capabilities that are reserved for our paid plans. But we're intentional in revisiting the model periodically. It's important, I think, to regularly challenge yourselves to ensure you don't fall into the trap of simply assuming what was best fit in the past is best fit now and in the future. Now what if the trial duration was limited by some dimension of usage instead of time? Or what if we didn't have a trial at all but put”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really like that guidance. I'll add that for many businesses, there might be some cost of service element to consider as well, of providing a feature to free users is cost prohibitive due to the volume, then that's obviously something you're going to want to reserve for paid. I mean, ultimately, that was the whole reason cited behind Heroku recently removing their FreePo and entirely. I think your plans from the From free to the top, they should have well-defined understanding of the target customer, the use cases. They should map out or you should map out the motivations for motion between each. You're really clear about what are the drivers for someone to take a step from one plan to the next. For Snake, the real drivers to move from free to a paid plan, for example, is when you want to secure business critical code and you start having needs around governance and compliance. I think the other...”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was it on your show with Elena that she talked about kind of things that promote your growth model being good to land in free and things that add friction?”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So CPO on the exec team Manoj, he runs the entire product organization. He has four, I want to say VPs that own different areas. So there's a couple of VPs that own different areas of the product. So first of all, our application security products. Secondly, our cloud security products. Third is platform. And fourth is what we call developer journeys, which is the area I own, which has a few groups within there, one of which being the growth group.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To how we work. One of the meetings that we have regularly is experiment plan reviews. They're kind of ad hoc meetings. They're led by the experiment lead. It could be the PM, could be anyone else in the team. The important thing is a bunch of people will be invited there, especially stakeholders from other teams where we might be experimenting on their surfaces. And that won't be the first time they've learned about this. We'd like to try and actually include them in co-designing the experiment plan so they're kind of fully on board with it, but absolutely kind of inviting them into those experiment plan review is really key. If we're going to run an experiment on that surface, you know, we need to make sure that everything in that experiment plan is watertight, especially from a scheduled link perspective, because the last thing we want is a week and a half into an experiment for some change to happen within that surface from the product team unaware that an experiment's happening.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we've got a fairly common pattern for how we structure our product and wider R&D org. So most of the org is functional ownership-based. There are a lot of really complex domains in the core product. So having that localized knowledge is important to be able to kind of own and run the code that Teamship. The growth teams, on the other hand, are structured by outcomes. We talked about that already. Owning areas like acquisition, activation, engagement, monetization. These outcomes and team remits change over time, as we talked about, but the teams here are often working on areas of the product where they don't own the code, which I think is the key difference between how we structure our growth teams and product teams, with some exceptions. You know, one of the growth teams actually owns the onboarding flows and so on. So that does require a lot of trust. It requires very transparent communication mechanisms built in.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically, the team level ceremony. It's PM lead. That's from more from a facilitation perspective. The learnings are all brought forward by the various folks in the team. And each one of them is contributed a learning will talk about that learning with the group and facilitate the discussion from there. And then at the group level, those are read by the directors for the growth group and each team might be an engineering lead, it might be a tech lead, it might be a designer, it might be the product manager. We'll talk about some key learnings from that month.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I say that's really important. But there's a bunch of different ways in which we're fanning out that information constantly.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That have been documented, their implications, how they can be leveraged in follow up work, where they might have relevance to other teams and so on. Relatively smaller part of the meeting is also spent looking at key metrics. Some teams have actually split that out entirely into a separate meeting. And then no time at all is spent reviewing what the team have actually been doing. It's more on kind of the outcomes and the learning. So that's at the team level, but then we run that same meeting at the group level on a monthly basis. So that's run by the product, engineering, or marketing director for the growth group. And that's where all of the growth teams come together. They share some key learnings. Can't share everything, of course, what they're doing is picking specific learnings that have potential relevance and utility across the other teams. So also as a standing agenda item for our user research team to share what we call developer insights. It's one of my personal favorite meetings to attend. It's always recorded and socialized with the rest of the company afterwards.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But from a ceremony perspective, we try hard to institutionalize ways to generate and leverage learning. It's something I feel pretty strongly about. So we have these team level impact and learnings reviews loosely modeled from a blog years back now, I don't know, six years, I want to say, that Brian Balfour wrote about a similar ceremony from these HubSpot days. And if I had to pick one meeting that as the most important in the growth team, it would be this. The teams continuously document any learnings from data exploration, from experimentation, from user research and so on. They document that in their weekly impact and learnings document. Some teams find it better to pair up in advanced into dedicated learning sessions to deep dive on specific relevant topics. But however it comes together, it's all kind of put into that document. When it comes to the meeting itself, it's usually run by the PM. Most of it is spent discussing learning.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, there's a bunch of Slack channels like Sync runs on Slack, basically. So there's a bunch of Slack channels. Even when we're planning experiments, those are kind of wide and in the open. And we invite collaboration on those.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With metrics design and so on. And then building core platform services as well that are useful for people outside of growth. So we built services that power contextual onboarding. And originally that was the intent, but now those same services can be used anywhere in the product to give contextual experiences. I know that was a bit of a ramble, but hopefully there's one or two useful things in there.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Entire product led sales process. It's powered by an evolving model that describes our understanding of users, teams, accounts, the usage and adoption patterns and signals that best inform where and how our GTM teams focused. You know, insights from growth teams often have utility far beyond growth, but people can't know if something is useful to them if you haven't shared it with them. So the learnings made in the growth teams, even those from mistakes or failures, we socialize them widely and visibly. We want every R&D team to be leveraging experimentation where appropriate to learn, to create business impact. So one of the things we did here is creating a paved road for adoption of behavioral analytics and experimentation stack, coach teams on getting started to make it as easy as possible for anyone to start to reap the benefits of the platform, built out internal education programs on data-driven development, on experimentation, built internal tools to help”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kit fuel for focus creativity, but at the same time, you know, slowing down to put the maturity in place as an org scales that the pace Sneak has. It's pretty much impossible. You still have to get stuff done while you're kind of building all that stuff out, right? You have to accept that you're going to make a bunch of mistakes along the way. You have to be 100% comfortable with that. And you have to treat those mistakes as learning opportunities that provide levers for improvement. And it's also useful to, you know, you asked about KPIs and what the team are responsible for. And that is one way in which a growth team absolutely needs to make impact. And it's the way that primarily they're going to be held accountable. But it's also, I think, useful to think about the efficacy of the growth org, not just in terms of the impact they drive via experiments and new product experiences and on core growth KPIs, but also how they enable and up-level the rest of the org. For example,”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data hard to trust. And that becomes a big problem. So we invested in tooling and processes for building out event tracking plans. And now we test conformance to Schema of the instrumented code in our CI processes. So we have absolute confidence in the data. So that was getting to a point of trustworthy behavioral data was absolutely key. But the reason I say invest early here is that to remember that it also takes time to accrue enough data that you can learn about and make some key decisions around retention, for example, or so that you have enough data to run regressions on, be able to inform definition of your activation metrics or engagement states and so on. So the earlier you can start collecting the better. People in process, a strategy and data, and you absolutely need all of those things to build and run an affected growth team. When you get all of those things working, it's like rock.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data was the last thing Growth team just can't function without dating that, even with early stage products before you have the needed volume of traffic to be able to run formal tests in reasonable timeframes, you still need to have signals that help you learn and inform your decisions, both quant and of course qual through speaking with users. My advice there is really just to invest early the infrastructure, the tooling and at a given scale, the dedicated people as well. They're going to be core to building out the growth team and they'll enable data to ultimately pretty much inform all critical decisions. So Snake was interesting that we didn't have a problem of not having enough data. In fact, there was an abundance of data, like too much. We collected absolutely everything. And the problem I identified very early was that we didn't have enough behavioral specific data and we weren't intentional enough about the data that we were collecting and how we were collecting it.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly that sort of thing. Or earlier on, for example, it might have been with that, taking that same example of that same loop, and this is sufficiently far in the past that it's easy for me to talk about. But we start with GitHub. We want to now expand the scope of that loop. We've seen success with it. We see the performance of that loop growing, but we think there's opportunity in saying let's expand that by adding support for Bitbucket. And now all of a sudden we spin up that same loop with Bitbucket and then GitLab and so on.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second is understanding the way they work in terms of what is constraining them, what are the inputs to them, what are the opportunities for making those loops spin faster, how can multiple loops work together in a macro context, and particularly using the data there to be able to identify and understand and get alignment around where are the biggest constraints in your growth model overall and therefore where are the things that we need to focus on as a team over the next quarter, two quarters and so on. And it's constantly changing, you know, as I mentioned, there's a bunch of stuff that needs to feed back into that model in terms of growth loop performance or the learnings you're making and so on. That mean it's changing and you're constantly reevaluating and it's guiding kind of quarter to quarter plan.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very simply, it's first of all alignment on how you grow, the different loops, how they work, the roles of different teams, and the roles that they play in fueling those loops and getting them to spin faster. I think that's the first thing. Having that common vocabulary and understanding.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growth iron allows you to balance your growth investments accordingly. It's neat for sure, you know, we've had times where we've focused on a broad set of constraints and opportunities and other times where we've had a much narrower focus, for example, on driving improvement to activation and engagement, even more narrow, like doing that through empty states, for example.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the quantitative side of things that helps guide quarter to quarter focus and ensure you can be intentional about where you're investing. That becomes a big enabler. You know, 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. And early on, you'll probably have one or two core loops, but inevitably you'll need to layer on and connect new ones over time. And having a framework for doing that and having a framework for regularly revisiting that in the context of growth team learnings, changes in broader company strategy, evolution of the product, new features being added and so on, market shifts. That becomes a big up level for teams to be able to create timely impact. So the model you create there is what enables you to know at any time where the biggest constraints.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strategy, yeah. So strategy, it's a good one. At a very basic level, you need to be able to answer questions, how do you require users? How do you retain users? How do you monetize them? And are you talked with Lena on that in more depth? But from there, you need, you know, you need more detail that's going to guide the growth teams in where they look for strategic opportunity, how they approach that. The best way I've found to articulate a growth strategy that fulfills the promise of usefully guiding the team's execution, it's the loop-based model reforge as specific kind of documentation that I think is great around that. Being able to identify the various micro and macro loops, how they're all connected, being able to document them in a qualitative model to communicate a shared understanding of how you grow, it's really powerful. Augmenting that then with”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, you've got to focus on when you build a strategic opportunity, you're thinking about the outcomes, but you don't just go right to the end state. You've got to think about what's the quickest way we can test this hypothesis. And from there, what do we learn from that? And what do we take into the next set of experiments? And it kind of, you're paving this path along the way. You know, kind of that rough destination, how you get there, you don't know at the start. And that's the path that the learnings take you on.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, you're there to create impact, right? There's no getting away from that, but learnings is the means. It's the same as there's a quote that I love from Farid Masawa around focus on the user's path to value, not on monetization, because if you focus on the form of the latter, it will follow. And that's the same thing with learnings and impact here. If you try and focus on the impact itself, 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.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generating learnings that the organization can leverage effectively to deliver outcomes might not be now, might not be tomorrow or some point in the future. But the sad reality is that without good process, learnings easily end up unused and gathering dust. And you have to ask then, what was the point? So as people and process and you know when that's on the right track when you start to see enthusiastic sharing of learnings, when you see regular contribution of ideas coming from everyone in the form of well-crafted hypotheses that are based on data and learnings and when you see a wide variety of folks just assuming end-to-end ownership of managing and running experiments instead of delegating that to the product manager or an engineering tech lead. So yeah, that's people and process and strategy is.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool. So people in process was the first, and how to process really quickly. I think on the process side, at a minimum here, you need well understood documented growth processes, practices, working cadences, teams in growth need to work differently in some ways from R&D teams working on core product, assuming otherwise and just giving growth responsibility to an existing team without working with them to implement appropriate ways of working. I think it's a common track. Ideally, you get to a point there where the growth process is something that's continually refined and iterated on, trying to build in more predictability. But what I've found, I think most singularly most important in a growth process is facilitating a rapid learning cadence and providing the means to socialize those learnings, surfacing them in the right place at the right time so they can be leveraged in other contexts. And if you think about experimentation, it's not about delivering outcomes. It's about”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happy to go into a bunch of that stuff. I know I'd mentioned earlier kind of three areas of building a growth team. I don't know if you want me to cover those other two because we talked about.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll give you one for the growth group with Sneak. So the vision, every developer securely unleashes their creativity. And the mission is to connect every developer and their organizations to the value of the Sneak platform with frictionless subserve adoption and expansion.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have. So if I think about sneak at large, you know, when it comes to advantage, we might mention our unequaled security intelligence and knowledge of application context. And one of the neat things about this framework is if you find utility in doing so, you can apply it at every level from the company level all the way down to individual team. It doesn't mean the process is not difficult and you need to spend a lot of time, but it gives you this set of kind of a framework, a set of really come out with well-crafted statements that kind of stand the test of time”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool. So the vision is the Nirvana state that you aim to enable for your users and customers in five to ten years. It's something that could equally be enabled by your competitors if you don't execute effectively or efficiently or quickly enough. You can always prefix a vision statement with a in the future dot dot dot. Now it's something that should be bound to your target market so not too wide and not too narrow. And critically, it should not mention your company, your product or anything solution related at all, completely agnostic of those things. And then the mission, that's the thing that you're going to relentlessly iterate on to take you incrementally closer to the Nirvana state described in the vision. It should answer how you'll realize the vision by describing what your fundamental approach will be. In other words, what you will do and how you'll do it. It should ideally aim to encode any unique differentiating advantage.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use that leads to, I think, great simple statements of an imagined better future state and your role in getting there. So I can talk about that a little bit if it's yeah, let's do it.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There. But people also need to be well aligned. I've talked about this actually on another podcast that I did recently. But what I mean by that is Execution is to be aligned with an evolving growth strategy, the growth strategy needs to be aligned with and at the same time influence where the company's going. The growth strategy needs hooks into the product strategy. And ideally, there's some overlap and alignment of KPIs so that growth teams and the core product teams are swimming in the same direction. The skills and experience in the team need to be aligned with the strategy. If you've got a focus on activation and acquisition, then someone who's plans and pricing expert probably isn't the right set of skills at that point in time. But you also leaders need to plan to ensure those skills are available as focus of the growth team inevitably shifts over time. But at the end of the day, I think everyone needs to be able to easily answer the question why they're there, why the work they're doing is important. I don't know if it's too far off track here, but I have a vision and mission framework that I like to use.”
2022-11-06 · Lenny's Podcast · How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source