When I joined Snyk, they had been looking for someone to lead growth and all things PLG for about a year. They had a broad understanding of what PLG was and had built a business around a bottom-up motion, but hadn't applied a scientific approach to it. There were no teams formally dedicated to owning growth; it was a responsibility of the core R&D function with some separate growth marketing activity happening as well.

So when I joined, I ring-fenced some teams to focus on growth and introduced this formal growth process, which was far more experimentation-based. It was relatively easy to get buy-in to ring-fence the growth teams, because the executive team already had a built-in desire to do things differently and they had a lot of trust in me. The challenge was in building an experimentation process. There was very little experience with formal experimentation programs within the company—and certainly not at scale.

A bunch of very important growth metrics weren't defined at this time. There was an existing definition of activation, which was a user-based metric. But in a B2B setting, it’s important to have an account-level metric here. After a bunch of research and analysis, we arrived at account-level metric called F30D (did this team fix a vulnerability using Snyk within their first 30 days?). We needed about 9 months of research and instrumentation to get here, because a lot of the behavioral data wasn't there before to be able to put a stake in the ground around the activation metric that was predictive of medium-term retention and propensity to buy.

As part of the same analysis, we landed on a value-based North Star metric: Weekly Fixing Orgs, or WFO. This metric wasn’t a specific objective for any of the growth teams. That was the broader North Star, and each growth team had more specific objectives based on input metrics. The thing about North Star metrics is that they can be fairly lagging. They’re not always a great KPI for an individual team.

We encouraged teams on a week-to-week or iteration-to-iteration basis, when they were pulling things into their backlog, to look at the things that they were pulling through the lens of their current strategic opportunity. Leadership would define the objectives on a quarterly basis, so that became a nice lens that the teams could use to say, “Is this experiment, is this idea, is this hypothesis something that is strategically aligned? Does it have the potential to deliver sufficient ROI?”

There weren't that many meetings, to be honest. Eng leads, PM lead, Growth Marketing Lead, and Data would get together on weekly basis to cross-pollinate. But we were able to stay aligned without causing meeting fatigue.

Feedback loops are absolutely essential in all parts of a growth process — not just for week-to-week learnings and generation of new hypotheses and ideas, but also being able to zoom out and look at learnings in the aggregate: what's happening in other parts of the business and the market, combined with more investigative research from the data team, and feeding that back into the growth strategy. You'll notice there is this loop back from from my growth database into the strategy, which is really important.

Most of the changes were more micro-adjustments in the strategy in terms of specific quarterly focuses. There weren't any major strategic shifts until about 14-15 months after we started. We were just getting going at that point, and we shifted away from new user and team acquisition towards deepening our efforts around activation and engagement. That all came from those feedback loops.

I think I was around employee number 350 when I first joined. In just a few years, we had about 1500 employees. The pace of growth was really rapid. Fortunately when I joined, I was given a bunch of resources and people to be able to kickstart the growth organization with.

Looking at the core problems that we wanted to solve, we identified three primary areas of focus: acquisition, activation and engagement, and monetization. We intentionally parked monetization as a problem for the first six months, so we initially had two teams: one focused on acquisition, and another focused on activation. We spun up a monetization team later, and then another 4-5 months after that, we added a growth platform team that owned a bunch of the experimentation and data infrastructure in terms of how it was consumed across the broader organization.

I'm a big fan of empowering teams to work as they see fit, given a strategic context and set of objectives. But in this specific context, given the lack of experience with formal growth processes, the teams were looking for perhaps more guidance and a little bit more prescription in terms of how they should work. I think this was perhaps a little bit too much freedom.

Ben Williams

When I joined Snyk, I introduced this experimentation-based growth process to help structure our PLG efforts.

This process itself will be a constantly evolving work in progress.
If you think of ways in which it can be leaner, more efficient, more scalable, let's talk about it!

When I joined Snyk

A bunch of very important growth metrics weren't defined at this time

I think I was around employee number 350 when I first joined

I'm a big fan of empowering teams to work as they see fit

Teams have full autonomy to define their own processes and cadence within the bounds of the following constraints.

Growth Process Map - Snyk

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