Ben Williams

Finding product-market fit often requires a 'depth-first' approach, focusing on a narrow persona and use case before expanding.

"Starting with that narrow focus and building around community engagement... was important because of this kind of depth verse breadth approach and that depth-first approach that Snyk took was importan..."

Mapping growth through qualitative and quantitative loop models provides a shared understanding and guides intentional investment.

"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 real..."

Integrating growth loops directly into the user's existing workflow (like GitHub PRs) creates a powerful acquisition and engagement engine.

"Snyk, 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 Snyk, they'll connect their GitHub..."

A loop-based strategy helps identify the biggest constraints in the growth model and balances investments accordingly.

"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... Being able to identify the various micro and ma..."

Monetization triggers should align with the user's transition from individual utility to organizational governance and scale.

"Your plans 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......"

Growth engineers require a specific mindset: a lack of attachment to code and a motivation for measurable impact over technical depth.

"The devs that really thrive in a growth context are the ones that are motivated by moving quickly, iterating to create measurable impact. They're not attached to their work. They embrace imperfection..."

True cross-functional growth teams should include growth marketers and decision scientists to broaden the 'toolbox' for execution.

"When creating the growth group, we resolved 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. E..."

Institutionalizing a 'learnings review' ceremony ensures that experiment data is actually leveraged for future decisions.

"We have these team level impact and learnings reviews... The teams continuously document any learnings from data exploration, from experimentation, from user research and so on. They document that in..."

Programmatic SEO assets that provide utility (like a package health score) can drive massive top-of-funnel acquisition.

"We have a side car product called Snyk Advisor. Snyk Advisor, it's basically a service that developers use to search and find open source packages when they're considering integrating some within thei..."

A strong product vision describes a future state for the user that is entirely agnostic of the specific solution or company.

"The vision is the nirvana state that you aim to enable for your users and customers in five to 10 years... It should be bound to your target market. So not too wide and not too narrow. And critically..."