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

“Work in the context of your growth process. So, the ideal state is that every growth team member has common vocabulary, they're comfortable with the growth process, they can work well with data and experimentation platform. They understand the data, they have the right skills and mindset. Education, I think, plays a big part here. So we're big fans of reforge, but we've also developed a bunch of internal programs to align and up-level the teams. Something we learned, I think as an example is the importance of starting simple and going deeper as the teams build experience. So for example, when it comes to experimentation, don't try at the beginning to introduce multivariate testing or concepts like sequential sampling as an alternative evaluation approach. If teams are still trying to just dip their toes in this water, it's kind of a recipe for a lot of mistakes. So, yeah, that would be some advice.”
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
“Iterating to create measurable impact. They're not attached to their work. They embrace imperfection as part of the process. They happily discard their code, their ideas even. They're curious and they're always looking for ways to be closer to their users. Now, those are the folks that generally make great growth engineers. And I've also known incredible engineers that are most motivated when they're working on really deep technical challenges and love the process as much as the outcome. And they've struggled in growth. Of course, it's never that simple. In reality, there's nobody who's really either extremity of that spectrum. But it's really important to try to answer the question, can this person do their best work in this environment? So I think that's a really key part of it. And you need to also make sure they're well equipped from this kind of skills and knowledge perspective as well. So they need the right skills and knowledge to be able to do their best.”
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
“It might be in relationships with co workers or in broader team dynamics, it might be in them not even being in the right role even. So fundamentally, I think it's the role of managers and leaders to help them identify those things and work with them to find ways to thrive and grow. And I've seen this have particular significance in a growth org where people are just naturally less good fit. Now that doesn't mean that they're not amazing, talented humans, right? It just means they aren't going to do their best work in a growth context. So when you're starting a growth team, you'll often be doing so with internal moves. So this can be something that's maybe a little bit easier to miss than with external candidates where you're likely testing for those things explicitly during the hiring process. I'll share an example with developers. So the devs that really thrive in a growth context are the ones that are motivated by moving quickly.”
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
“This is a big topic. I have a lot of thoughts here based on what I've seen work well and also not so well. I think I can broadly bucket things here into maybe three main topics. So the first will be people and process. The second would be strategy. And the third would be data. Now they're all related and they all have to be working well to be effective in growth. Starting with people. I maybe touched the first element there in terms of balance teams. Now you've got to have those balanced teams with diversity and ability to create great ideas but also ability to execute. That's the first thing. But still on the topic of people, I have this kind of mental model that potential at its core is unbounded, but that a bunch of things situationally prevent people from fulfilling their potential. You know, it might be how they're thinking about something. It might be organizational.”
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 what she does do a great job of is providing the kind of continuously updated guidelines on how content should be structured to lead us to good results.”
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
“Well, she's part of growth marketing, but she works extremely closely with the growth teams, and she's got a few people in her organization, and we bring them into specific SEO focused initiatives when we're looking to build loops around that. Incredibly important to have someone like that who understands that at a far deeper level than I could ever hope to, how SEO works. particularly in terms of keeping on top of some of the things that Google are constantly doing in terms of their algorithm changes.”
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, that's right. And that team is also responsible for making that data available elsewhere in the organization as well. Product-led sales is a really important motion for us. And so taking the knowledge we have, the insight we have around behavior with users and their teams and their companies within the product and making that available to the GTM teams outside in smart ways, allowing them to focus on the things that are most important to focus on. That's a really important part of what that team does.”
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
“Now we saw really great results with that visitor traffic saw a significant increase. Sign up rate dropped a little bit as we'd expect it would, but overall new users had a big bump and those users had much higher intent, which we saw play out with increased activation rates.”
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
“Having a growth marketer in an acquisition focused team led us to some lightweight experimentation on the website in creating an SEO optimized page. It was something that was really high performing both from the perspective of traffic and conversion. But it didn't require any engineering resources to create. So the growth marketer in the team and they decided together this was something worth pursuing, but the growth marketer was able to kind of execute that independently. engineers were working on other things. But then based on the success of that, the team went on to build out a functional sidecar product that allowed users to basically try Sneak without needing to sign up by simply pasting their code in for us to scan and giving them some results there and then. Absolutely.”
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
“It's important to have balanced teams with strong diversity across multiple vectors, focusing on functional diversity at the moment, which is kind of what you're asking about with having growth marketers on the team. One of the big benefits you get is a broader palette of ideas, but also a bigger toolbox when it comes to execution, which generally translates in an ability and a growth team for them to test and learn faster with more parallel yet at the same time aligned threads. Perhaps I can give a recent example 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
“So it started off from a fundamental BI data analyst perspective, but over time we wanted to apply a much deeper level of analysis on the data such that we could start to build in predictive models that could help us make better decisions and can ultimately fuel and power some of the in-product experiences. Yeah, we spun up a decision science function and yeah, those folks are very smart”
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
“We resolve this by ensuring that each of the growth teams were truly cross functional in nature with everyone in each team aligned around common objectives and KPIs. Every team has engineers and engineering manager, a product manager, a designer, a growth marketer, decision science support. And the basic shape of the growth teams that will be familiar to most. I spoke to a bunch of people over the last couple of years. I've actually learned to my surprise that inclusion of growth marketers in the product teams is not all that common. And I personally think there's just a lot of opportunity being missed there. And I expect that to start to become the norm rather than the exception over 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
“Self serve revenue channel until we felt confident that we'd built the necessary growth muscles to scale, and B, we'd figured out some of the more pressing issues that were present earlier in the user journey. So it was important that we felt really confident about our ability to effectively connect developers to Sneak's value in such a way that introducing and optimizing a self-serve revenue channel would make sense. I also really wanted to avoid one of the common failure modes I've seen around cross-functional collaboration and growth. So when I joined, there was an inherent tension built into the system. It was particularly noticeable between R&D and the growth marketing team. I had amazing people in both teams, a ton of really great ideas, but many of them were just not being executed on. And it was leading to a lot of friction, a lot of frustration, ultimately caused by misaligned incentives between the different functions. So when creating 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
“Right now, we have dedicated teams focused on acquisition, activation, and monetization, along with a supporting team who own our growth platform, including all of our data and experimentation stack. But the macrostructure, it's changed over time to enable us to focus on the biggest constraints in our growth model. So at the beginning, we just focused on acquisition and activation.”
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 baked into the company DNA in terms of how teams think and operate. So, yeah, we were growing fast even before we spun up the growth group. I think the significant change that happened there was it was a transition from a simple freemium approach to a holistic and well-coordinated PLG strategy. It's much more common to start earlier. Much more common to start at a smaller scale that we did at St. But it worked for us because of this kind of perfect storm of where we had a product with that bottom-up growth built in from the beginning. We have founders with a deep appreciation for how the product could grow. And there was strongly exec alignment and sponsorship for scaling the motion. So the problem when starting the growth group, it was really the most part more oriented to how we can get the flywheel spinning faster as opposed to getting it moving in the first place.”
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
“Were some ad hoc efforts happening in various places. We had a small growth marketing function. We had DevRel. We also had some ownership of key growth surfaces in R&D. There was a team that owned the new user onboarding flows, for example. But it wasn't until I joined that we really formalized the notion of a growth team. It was very kind of ad hoc before then. When I joined, we created what we call the developer growth group now. Before then, there maybe wasn't as strong an understanding about what a growth team needs to look like, how they might need to work differently to the core product teams. And I'd say overall, it was much later than you typically expect to see. And at a bigger scale, you normally are going to start growth teams, one or two people, three or four maybe, and scale out from there. But we started much bigger than that. But at the same time, this bottom-up developer first approach.”
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, don't think the challenges were there in terms of the developer adoption. So even when those first kind of forays into self-serve were struggling in terms of breaking into some of the larger customers, the developer adoption, the free user base was still growing at a really good pace. That momentum was just constantly building and it's that momentum that is ultimately fueled the sales-led business as we've gone through the years. But it was just those few things, I think, that I mentioned earlier in terms of stumbling blocks that needed to be overcome because when those first sales and marketing hires did join us and we started having conversations and we also tweaked some of the things in the product to meet some had some breadth, add some additional languages, ecosystems, build in those table stakes features, then it kind of really unlocked and it was kind of wrong.”
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
“They could theoretically be the only user of Sneak and connect their repos all of a sudden with protecting, securing those repos, a thousand developers could be working in GitHub with that code, all benefiting from Sneak without necessarily needing to sign up. So that's that example of kind of taking the product to users without pulling them out of their workflows. And I think that's absolutely critical.”
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
“As painless as it absolutely needs to be. And that means really meeting them where they are, integrating with their tools, finding ways to take security to them instead of trying to pull them out of their workflows. 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. So the GitHub kind of pull requests are a great example of that. Someone can sign up for Sneak and”
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 think there's two things, right? So, first of all, fundamentally, for someone to get excited about using a product, they've got to care enough, right? They've got to have a problem that you're solving. So I think there's two things. One, there is a shift that is happening and still happening. I think there's still a long way to go for developers to really care about security as an integral part of their job in the same way they think about functional quality or performance. I think that we're still, we're making strong progress there. It's changing all the time. But there's still a long way to go there. But the reality is that I think in most companies, developers have to care about security because their companies need to be secure. So the key then is how do I make the job of being secure for these developers?”
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 think it is important to acknowledge though that the product has always played a really key part in the sales process 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
“Today, it's less like that. There are organizations where the buying center is still very much APSEC. But there are also many organizations where kind of technical leaders own the buying decision around security investments. What was always true, though, even back then was the influencing power of developers regardless of where they're buying sentences.”
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
“Teams worked hard over the next few months, starting to build support for additional languages and ecosystems and adding those table stakes features. I think back then, Sneak were simply ahead of this inevitable curve of developer first security at the time, the only buyers were security teams, and Deb first security for the most part wasn't something that CISOs and AppSec leaders were driving. But if you look at Sneak through that lens of, as I mentioned, being a change agent, being a key piece of the transformational journey of our customers DevSecOps journeys, you realize how important it was for us to start to build relationships with those security leaders. So it was that time also that it was the right time to bring in the first sales and engineering hires as well.”
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
“The importance of catering for the broader governance needs of the enterprise buyer. And that meant a couple of things. First, there was a need to build out table stakes features around governance at scale, just things that companies of a certain scale and size expected, reporting, robust user management and so on. And second, that it was time to move beyond that depth first approach, right? So that depth first approach was absolutely critical in getting to that point, but it wasn't good enough to take the next step. If you think about it, there's a point in a company scale where you start to see diversification of tech stacks and all of those tech stacks need securing. It's obvious in retrospect that only supporting developers using a narrow slice of those tech stacks wasn't going to meet the needs of the security teams who were ultimately the people who were held accountable for the security of their entire application estate.”
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 the time, no, a few things were in place. Valuable product, check, strong developer user growth check, strong retention check. But the first self-serve monetization efforts only really saw traction with individual developers paying $100 a month or purchases in larger companies. They just didn't happen, as everyone had hoped. There was a really critical part of Sneak's history. At the time, a bunch of investors didn't lean in, perhaps shy away from early conviction with the founders on building strong usage without a proven path to monetization at that point. Ed at Bolstar, who I mentioned previously, he was one of the first kind of true believers and was, I think, really key in helping with providing runway during that time. But it was clear that there was a lot of work still to do. The team dived in. They really figured out what the constraints were and through that process really learned about 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
“Yeah, I mean, I didn't talk about those. I think those are pretty well understood. We have both referral loops and invite loops as well.”
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
“Get access beyond more than a couple, but these were just all out there in the public domain. So that works really well for us from a company generated, company distributed loop as well.”
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
“Of the recent ones that's really interesting is security education. We think of Sneak as a change agent in helping DevSecOps transformations. And it's fine kind of having this capability, but what we really want to get to is this position where developers truly understand and can be better placed to prevent security vulnerabilities being injected into their code. And so one of the things that is again something that's pretty different from the industry from an incumbent perspective is that we believe it's really important to democratize security education. And so we have been building this bunch of really high quality but bite-sized lessons about developer security that focus on developers, about security issues and vulnerabilities. And we surface them again. They're out there in the public domain. There's no paywall to get access to those. All the traditional solutions you need to sign up. You need to pay to.”
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
“Sneak advisor will be right up there in terms of the search results they'll land on there, they'll get a good idea about that package. They can look at similar packages and it's all, of course, a sneak website. And we have CTAs to say, you know, if you want to secure your application on a perpetual basis, then just come and join us. So that's a great loop. But that's all kind of a programmatic asset. So there are hundreds of thousands of these package pages, but they're just automatically being generated continuously.”
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
“We have a bunch of loops actually at this point. Yeah, I'm a big lupus, funnily enough. But yeah, we have a bunch of loops. Company generated company distributed content loops have actually worked really well for us. We have a sidecar product called Sneak Advisor. Sneak Advisor is basically a service that developers use to search and find open source packages when they're considering integrating some within their software applications. The unique thing about it is it indexes all of the package managers. It learns about those packages. It augments them the data about them with a bunch of metadata, including, of course, sneak security scans, but we also find out how actively maintained the software is on the source repo on GitHub or wherever. And so we build this kind of package health score. So anyone searching on Google for a package that does XYZ or a specific package by name.”
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 was one of the loops. We also have a couple of from fairly early on as well other content loops that are more kind of programmatic SEO assets that have both been pretty instrumental in terms of new user growth here.”
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, that integration in terms of connecting your code with security scanning like that was a first of a kind integration. But the key was that we ultimately controlled the contents. And not only was the fixed pull request. Doing something useful in terms of the code, but all of the description of the pull request was explaining about the vulnerability educating users, and it was all sneak branded and saying, if you find this useful, click”
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
“It was kind of a function of when we were chatting before this, talked a little bit about some of the failed Experiences spinning up a self serve revenue channel.”
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
“Or find vulnerabilities, will automatically create sneak branded pull requests to fix those vulnerabilities. Other devs in the repo will see and interact with those PRs. And some of them will follow links to Sneak, create accounts, and some of them will connect their own repos. And so the loop continues. So company-generated, company distributed content loop. It's actually really powerful for us because it's both an acquisition loop and an engagement loop. Over the course of time, we extended that loop by adding support for other source control systems beyond GitHub. We layered on a bunch of new loops. And I think if founders can be intentional about this as you're developing early product iterations, then you're going to have a big advantage when the product clicks with the market. And that was built into Sneak as we went along. So that was kind of ready as we found product market fit. But I think to talk about specifically how Sneak took that next stage.”
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
“Design those loops into the product, it's key. And when I say product, I really mean the whole product experience, considering every touch point in and out of the core application that your users and customers might have with you. Sneak, for example, believed very early that we could build out powerful content loops via fixed pull requests that we raise on GitHub. New users, they'll sign up for Sneak, they'll connect their GitHub accounts. Sneak will scan their code.”
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, for sure. First, I think if we're talking about PLG, the story with Sneak, I actually like that definition of product-led acquisition from Julian Shapiro when you spoke with him. Beyond that maniacal focus on finding product market fit for your product, founders really should be thinking about how their product is going to grow. And that's important, of course, as you think about taking that next step. Let's assume in a simplistic definition that you found product market fit as demonstrated by strong retention. And then the real question is, where are the new users for your product going to come from? And founders really should have, I think, strong hypothesis around this. Your risk essentially adopting, if we build it, they will come approach. So if your acquisition strategy is product-led, then understanding and being intentional about your early acquisition growth loops, I think is an essential founder's responsibility, dedicating time there to”
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
“Waido was absolutely critical and generally just sound advice around finding product market fit and building solid momentum before casting a wider net. And, you know, it's difficult to maintain that focus for sure as the lure of that bigger TAM can be really tempting, but ultimately you have to be able to service a market well to capture 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
“Ecosystems. That's a very widespread problem. It affects the industry at large. But that just spoke to the potential opportunity that was there to be unlocked. But the key for Sneak, I think, was just not to go too wide too early. So they focused on nailing that initial use case for that specific community of Node.js devs. Like I say, narrow enough to be able to really focus on quickly building a compelling solution to a real problem, but also wide enough to be something viable from a growth perspective. And even back then, the NPM, the Node package manager hosted around 200,000 open source packages. They were downloaded something like two and a half billion times a month by over 2 million devs. And the typical Node app would have hundreds of dependencies, mostly indirect and so hidden, less immediately visible. But each of those dependencies brought with it some security risks. So yeah, I think nailing that narrow and deep use case before expanding.”
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 think that focus was the really important kind of element there, if I can kind of latch on that. Starting with that narrow focus and building around community engagement, I think it's a well-proven playbook now, particularly in the developer tooling space. Like New Relic did it notably with Ruby Community, for example. But ultimately, it was important because of this kind of depth versus breadth approach. And that depth first approach that Sneak took was important to be able to effectively validate the solution on the path to product market fit. A JavaScript developer just won't care if you support Golang or Rust, but will absolutely care if a key feature like automated package upgrades just isn't available for their ecosystem. Of course, the bigger problem of vulnerable components in open source across all languages and all”
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
“It was less about a particular place, but more about the community of developers themselves who focused on Note.js. So, you know, a bunch of kind of early evangelism was really at conferences. It was, I think, the Velocity Conference in Amsterdam where Diane Azef kind of first unveiled Sneak to the World and kind of went from 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
“That's really it. The community was growing for sure. It was big enough to have a decent opportunity there, but narrowly enough that technology wise, it didn't mean it meant that a product could be brought to market in a reasonable 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
“The Developer Security Company. We make it ridiculously easy for developers and their teams to improve their security posture while still moving fast. So Sneak can find and automatically fix vulnerabilities in code, open source dependencies, containers, infrastructure and cloud configurations, and all underpinned by the best”
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 learned a ton of useful stuff there, but also that I had a strong preference for working in smaller, fast-growing orgs versus three hundred fifty thousand people be a moths. After an interest in unexpected interlude leading a DevOps transformation at a FinTech and some consulting and advising, I then joined CloudBs. They're a DevOps startup with an open core model. I was leading product design and growth there. Stayed with them for three years through several raises and a period of really fast growth before finally joining Sneak to build out our growth organization and lead our developer experience initiatives. I have a broader remit at Sneak now than just the Growth Org, but yeah, that's how it started.”
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'll try to keep it reasonably short. My education is in computer science. Graduated from the University of Manchester back in the late 90s, had already landed as a job as a developer but ended up having a bunch of other interesting offers, one of which was to join a small startup building requirements management tooling for product and engineering folks. This was all pre-agile, but that whole space of developer tooling, engineering tooling, it was something I just felt naturally drawn to. And it's where I've really specialized through my whole career. I actually joined that company as a solutions engineer, so lots of demos and so on. I was really close to the product team, but also speaking with customers every day, which as is quite common, I think, was my path into product there. Several years and a few acquisitions later, I find myself in IBM with the rational software developer tooling group. I was leading parts of the product strategy there and a bunch of initiatives. I actually...”
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 very much Lenny. Thanks first of all for inviting me. It's a pleasure to finally meet you. I've got to say that kind of what you're creating with the newsletter and now the podcast, such as such awesome resources for the product growth and why detect communities. So it's a real honour to be invited onto the show. And I hope there's a few useful things that people can take away.”
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
“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 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.”
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