How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk) artwork

How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut | Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

November 6, 2022

Ben Williams is VP of Product at Snyk, an industry-leading security platform for developers, last valued at $8.5b. He’s also a product and growth advisor with over 20 years of experience building and scaling high-performing product and growth teams.
Speakers: Ben Williams, Lenny Rachitsky
**Ben Williams** (0:00)
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're never gonna 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:40)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Ben Williams. Ben is a VP of product at Snyk, which is likely one of the biggest and most interesting companies that you've never heard of. Snyk makes it easy for developers to catch security issues in their code. And there's a lot to learn from how Snyk got started. It started through product-led growth, evolved into product-led sales, was very community-driven, and was also laser-focused on developers which has become one of the most lucrative markets to go after. In our conversation, we cover how the founders of Snyk got their first hundred users, what they got wrong when they tried to monetize early on, when they hired their first marketing and salespeople, how they structured and grew their growth in product teams, what they figured out about what should go into freemium and what shouldn't, and so much more. As you'll soon hear, Ben is British, and so the episode is automatically gonna sound more sophisticated, and I can't wait for you to hear it. With that, I bring you Ben Williams.
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