One year working in Growth! ??

It has been a year since I started my journey in Product Led Growth (PLG)! I joined?Snyk?in March 2022 to lead the engineering side of our Growth group. While Growth concepts sounded simple to me initially, making them work for your product's domain and users is far from simple!?

In this post, I will share some of my takeaways and reflections.

?? Experiments = learning and sometimes a payoff

I saw first-hand that one experiment rarely massively moves the needle on a key metric, but it can! The faster you can learn and apply the learning, the higher chances of a positive outcome. But before dreaming about the potential payoff, design the experiment to maximize learning and apply relevant past learning. Keeping a learning catalog can help here, but remember; learnings have a half-life!

We had some minor changes pay off in a big way, especially on unoptimized high-volume surfaces. For example, simple things like adjusting CTA placement and messaging on our company-generated content sites positively impacted user acquisition. Running these changes as experiments enabled us to confidently say our change made a difference, and we can then apply the learning to similar surfaces.

We also found that some bigger bets deeper into the product did not pay off as we had hoped. Most of the time, it was due to bet sequencing, i.e., needing other parts of the growth model to work effectively first. A good example would be focusing on monetization optimization before having solid activation and engagement.

?? Is it all about experiments??

Well-designed in-product experiments can take too long to reach statistical significance, especially deeper in the product, where you might not have the user volume. Keep doing user research, prototyping, wizard of oz testing, working with domain experts, and looking at competitive and adjacent products. We learned much from product tear-downs and testing our learnings with users through mockups and rapid prototypes.

My takeaway here is to experiment with different ways to test and learn across your key metrics. It will likely not be the same across all of them.

?? Bets and Loops

Have a portfolio of Growth bets. It balances risk and can result in collecting smaller wins that give compounding returns over time. Easier said than done; big bets are alluring! Using Growth Loops helped us to identify opportunities and spread our bets. We then run spikes to flesh out the technical complexity, different approaches to the problem, and how to break it down into smaller slices and size the bet in terms of risk and delivery cost.

Once it clicked for me that these Growth Loops interact and form the overall Growth Model, I started to see that the compounding nature of loops can cascade through the model. The hard part is getting data across all of your Loops to build a full qualitative model, but start small, measure what you think are your key loops, and go from there!

?? "Isn't Growth just about acquiring users?"

It was tempting to overly focus on user acquisition growth. It's important to get potential users through the door, but it can turn into a vanity metric if they don't go on to complete a core Growth loop. I learned it was equally important to ask, "will the user we just acquired":

• Have an Aha moment for their problem with our product?
• Go on to Activate?
• Stay Engaged with the core product??
• Invite or refer their team or peers??
• See enough value to convert to a paying customer?

This ultimately leads us to ask "are we targeting the right persona through our marketing and awareness assets?"

And, of course, the user will only stay for a short time with a product that doesn't solve a real problem for them and delivers an exceptional user experience!?

???Running multiple GTM strategies

Snyk applies a combination of PLG, Product-Led Sales (PLS), and Sales-Led GTM strategies. This approach can work well and does at Snyk, but it takes real effort (and tools!) to ensure the overall customer journey is seamless. This approach is good when you have a solid understanding of your customer segments and their unique needs. It's also essential to design and measure the interaction between the plays.

• Did that Sales-Led deal with an executive buyer land because of the five teams in their org using your product already via the PLG motion?
• Do people keep getting routed to sales that just want to be left alone and try the product for awhile first?
• Which channels result in higher rates of customer success and retention? Why?

It takes genuine buy-in from the leadership team and dedicated folks knee-deep in data refining the PQL + MQL models and the general GTM strategy!

?? What will I do differently this year??

1. Be explicit about strategy and write things down frequently. Getting caught in the whirlwind of activity is easy in a fast-paced Growth group. Decisions get made faster when we write down the strategies (technical or product), what we have learned, the data we are seeing and scenario plan our next steps.
2. Invest more in maintenance + automation to keep our Growth engine running smoothly. It's easy and exciting to rush onto the next Growth opportunity. I will be investing time in maintenance and systematic improvements to our Growth tooling to simplify doing the right thing, which will help us scale our Growth efforts.
3. Spend more time learning from peers working in other Product-Led companies. I get much value from those in the Product-Led space sharing on LinkedIn. I learn something new every day from the community, so thank you!?