Ben Williams

If you try and focus on the impact itself might struggle. If you focus on the things you need in terms of learnings to take you step by step, that will pave the path to creating impact.

For us, activation is indicative of the team forming a habit around the usage of Snyk. And when I say the usage, I actually mean deriving core value, which is ultimately fixing vulnerabilities. It's not just logging in. It's not even just finding vulnerabilities, it's fixing vulnerabilities.

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.

New users, they'll sign up for Snyk, they'll connect their GitHub accounts, Snyk will scan their code, will find vulnerabilities, will automatically create Snyk-branded pull requests to fix those vulnerabilities. Other devs in the repo will see and interact with those PRs, and some of them will follow links to Snyk, create accounts and some of them will connect their own repos, and so the loop continues.

The reason I say team instead of using them is, and we actually base most of our definitions of activation engagement around teams. It's really important because ultimately security is a team sport.

Flow is just this incredibly important concept for developers and you want to strive to keep them in that flow for as long as possible. The GitHub kind of pool requests are a great example of that. Someone can sign up for Snyk and they could theoretically be the only user of Snyk and connect their repos. All of a sudden we're protecting, securing those repos, a hundred, a thousand developers could be working in GitHub with that code, all benefiting from Snyk without necessarily needing to sign up.

For Snyk, the real drivers to move from free to a paid plan, for example, is when you want to secure business critical code and you start having needs around governance and compliance.

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. Every team has engineers, an engineering manager, a product manager, a designer, a growth marketer, decision science support.