This is the outcome-oriented 30/60/90 day plan I created BEFORE joining Snyk to lead PLG efforts.

Creating this myself ahead of starting in the role enabled me to get to IMPACT much sooner than I otherwise could.

30/60/90s are not new, but traditionally they are created collaboratively with your manager during your early onboarding period.

For product and growth roles in senior leadership or exec level that's TOO LATE. You should already know/have extensively thought through what inputs and learnings are critical to your success. You should have learned through the hiring process the most pressing challenges important for you to solve, and the status quo.

Even for less senior product and growth roles, thinking through in advance what you'll need to learn to be able to get to impact faster is a hugely valuable exercise.

When you join, particularly when it is a fairly high profile role, there's a bunch of expectation. Pretty much everyone in the company has a slightly different perspective on the importance of the role and what this role is. In my case, when it was around PLG, even understanding what PLG is was a little bit confusing. Everyone is thinking, you are the answer to the problem.

I wanted to try and avoid all of that. Acknowledge it's there, but do not be distracted by it.

Because, at the same time people are sending you this, that, and the other and asking to show you this and show you that. This plan allowed me to stay focused on what was really important in the early period.

Two key things I did:

1. I went on a company All Hands meeting and did a 20-minute segment on PLG. I introduced it, aligned the entire company around what it was and how we would be approaching setting up the team around key work.

2. There's a point in the plan where I talk about aligning around expectations with the exec team. Having that very clear is super important otherwise you'll be heading in a different direction vs the rest of the exec team.

The more senior the role, the more the expectation that onboarding is something that you will own and drive. That means it's critical for senior leaders to be proactive with building, iteratively refining and executing on their 30/60/90s.

The decision to build the plan before I started was driven by the desire to minimise my time-to-impact. I wanted to avoid spending the first couple of weeks meandering around the organisation as I developed an initial plan.

If I had the opportunity to do things differently, I'd bring forward even more of the key stakeholder meetings before I started - though appreciate that's not always an option.

In the first call, I try to not even discuss work and get to know them as a person and start to build a relationship even before I start.

In the second call, I make it about them. I want to understand more about what they do, their organisation, what they care about, how they are goaled, their working and communication preferences, their idealogies, how they and their teams prefer to work with partners in product, their current most important challenges and frustrations, and more.

There is a lot in this plan. I had to pick the three most impactful things they would be:

1. Aligning on role, responsibilities, and expectations - you need to know where you should be going and how your success will be judged - ideally, you are actively defining this through the hiring process

2. Understanding the business, customers and product - it is the context you'll need to develop strategy and roadmaps

3. Learning the company operating system - the unique organisational environment that will dictate many aspects of how you work

The cheeky fourth would be continuously iterating on the broader plan.

I've likely already learned some of this during the recruitment process. At a high level, I'm looking at metrics including:

- Top-line growth rate
- NDR and trend
- Gross margin trend
- Account waterfall
- H/C growth rate
- Unit economics inc CAC payback
- High-level financial plan/model (and all the assumptions that go into it)

Product and Growth metrics I cover in a separate section. But I want to understand the context for the product and growth metrics which the business metrics provide.

This is often overlooked. It's really important to be messaging the product and company with language that naturally resonates with the market and users. You can have PMF but be hugely constrained in your ability to attract and convert visitors into customers because of how you are talking to them through your messaging.

The same resonating language is something that should permeate the whole product experience - from the marketing landing page through the product itself.

A nice simple example of this is from Casey Winters and his time at Pinterest. Their main action use to be named "Pin It." One change they made was to change the language to "Save." This resonated more deeply especially with new users and they saw engagement improve substantially.

The hardest objective/tasks will vary from company to company.

At Snyk, one of the hardest was getting detailed and accurate behavioral data. There was a strong Operations and BI team with lots of business metrics but there was little on the product data. So I was unfortunately not able to answer all of these within the first 30 days, but it informed my initial plan of action - get the data in a better place.

Conversely, the product and GTM culture made it really easy to join customer calls. The GTM teams appreciated the PLG motion which made things easier there.

Getting quick wins is common advice. Here were some that I took on:

1. For product changes, there was a bunch of low-hanging fruit in the signup/login flow that we addressed as a means to show progress while also getting the team reps in around experimentation.

2. I initially focused on getting the team aligned on the understanding of how the growth team was going to work and what was most important to focus on.

3. There was a significant cultural shift that we went through. We put things in place like a growth process with key ceremonies. Impact and learning were early signals to the rest of the organisation that something different and important was underway.

4. We started to address some key gaps I found in my onboarding tasks like stronger behavioural product analytics that allowed discovery and socialisation of key insights. It also surfaced some key product issues even before we did anything to address them.

Creating a manifesto document was important. Everyone had a different understand of what growth was. A couple of misunderstandings:

1. Equating growth with marginal gains, i.e. growth hacking and that experimentation was something that primarily applied to changing colors. There was biased perception in what experimentation should be used for and the type of impact it drove.

2. Another was just a lack of understanding of how growth teams work differently than core product teams. At Snyk, the product team was historically focused on meeting the needs of the next largest paying customer. So I had to make it clear that wasn't the way the growth team was going to work, why it wasn't appropriate, and the different processes we were going to use.

Thankfully I had the executive support that I needed to have the autonomy to drive this kind of change.

One thing you have to factor in is the rate of change in the company. I joined Snyk when it was 300 people. By the time I left, it was 1500 people. That meant every month there might be 50 to 100 new people who bring in their own ideas of what PLG is, what the growth strategy should be, and how we should operate. You need to constantly evolve and evangelize.

Ben Williams

Before starting as the VP of Products at Snyk, I created this outcome- oriented 30/60/90 day plan to help me hit the ground running leading PLG efforts.

30/60/90 day plan for VP of Products at Snyk

Ben Williams - 30/60/90 Day Plan

VP Products (PLG, Developer Journeys)

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