The Exchanges

Q Awesome. To give folks a sense of just how successful and big Snyk has gotten, one is just, what does Snyk do? We haven't even talked about that yet. And then two, just some stats about the scale of the company and the business at this point.

A The developer security company. We make it ridiculously easy for developers and their teams to improve their security posture while still moving fast. So Snyk can find and automatically fix vulnerabilities in code, Open source dependencies, containers, infrastructure and cloud configurations, and all underpinned by the best security intelligence data in the market with a laser focus on developer experiences, which is why we're, we're really different. It's also an amazingly fast growing business with some stellar PLG focused investors and board members from the likes of Ed Sim at Boldstart to Tamar Yahoshua, Slack's CPO. We were founded in 2015. Last valuation after our Series F was at 8.6 billion. We're securing the software of millions of developers now, well over 2000 paying customers, now around 1300 people, of which around 500 in R&D, with nearly 70 folks in our product org. And the people here just create this amazing culture, and all in all, it's just a really exciting place to be.

AI assessment note: “Last valuation after our Series F was at 8.6 billion. We're securing”

Q It's good for a product leader to have that enjoyment. Favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates?

A Give a couple here if it's not cheating too much. First is one I like to ask when hiring for, for anyone actually really, um, it's fast forward three years. What's different about you then? A lot of people will default to telling you where they aspire to be in terms of role or title. But what I'm really looking for is signals of humility, of self-awareness around areas of personal and professional growth. So, you know, people who can be open about Where they think they need to work on to, to grow themselves as people. I love that. Also, just generally throughout interviews, I'm looking for curiosity. So day to day, good PMs will be asking why as much as my six year old son does, which is a lot. So I'll try and discern that through the course of the conversation. It's not really a question, but something I'm looking for. And then maybe I want to flip it because building on something, um, that Adam Fishman was saying his theme of evaluating the people dimension of folks you're potentially going to work with when you're interviewing with a company. And this was a question I got asked myself recently by a candidate, which I just thought was brilliant. And that was, tell me about the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives that you've recently personally been involved with. And that It just felt like a really great way for them to be able to test alignment of their p…

AI assessment note: “it's fast forward three years. What's different about you then?”

Q it? Just like how many teams do you have? Do you align it across by outcome or is it by surface area of a product? And then is the growth team like adjacent to this product org? Is it like a unit within the product org or is it integrated, but I don't think it is. So yeah, just how do you, what does that look like org chart wise?

A Yeah, I think we've got a fairly common pattern for how we structure our product and wider R and D org. So most of the org is functional ownership based. There are a lot of really complex domains in the core product. So having that localized knowledge is important to be able to kind of own and run the code that team ship. The growth teams on the other hand are structured by outcomes. We talked about that already, owning areas like acquisition, activation, engagement, monetization. These outcomes and team remits change over time, as we talked about, but the teams here are often working on areas of the product where they don't own the code, which I think is a, the key difference between how we structure our growth teams and product teams, with some exceptions, you know, one of the growth teams actually owns the onboarding flows and so on. So that does require a lot of trust. It requires very transparent communication mechanisms built into how we work. One of the meetings that, that we have regularly is experiment plan reviews. They're kind of ad hoc, ad hoc meetings. They're led by the experiment lead. Could be the PM, could be anyone else in the team. The important thing is a bunch of people will be invited there, especially stakeholders from other teams where We might be experimenting on their surfaces and that won't be the first time they've learned about this. We'd like to tr…

AI assessment note: “most of the org is functional ownership based. The growth teams on the other hand”

Q haven't heard that before. It's implies a bias towards action versus just we're going to do a bunch of cool stuff with data. Interesting. Okay. And then you said that there's a growth marketer embedded on each team. So maybe just broadly what makes up these teams, which you touched on briefly, and then what have you learned is the value of having a growth marketer embedded within each team?

A It's important to have balanced teams with strong diversity across multiple vectors. Focusing on functional diversity at the moment, which is kind of what you're asking about with having growth marketers on the team, one of the big benefits you get Is a broader palette of ideas, but also a bigger toolbox when it comes to execution, which generally translates in an ability in a growth team for them to test and learn faster with more parallel yet at the same time aligned threads. Perhaps I can give a, a recent example there. So having a growth marketer in an acquisition focused team led us to some lightweight experimentation on the website in Creating an SEO optimized page. It was something that was really high performing, both from the perspective of traffic and conversion, but it didn't require any engineering resources to create. So the growth marketer and the team, and they decided together this was something worth pursuing, but the growth marketer was able to kind of execute that independently while engineers were working on other things. But then based on the success of that, the team went on to build out a functional sidecar product that Allowed users to basically try sneak without needing to sign up by simply pasting their code in for us to scan and giving them some results there and then. So, you know, we saw really great results with that. Visitor traffic saw a signific…

AI assessment note: “one of the big benefits you get Is a broader palette of ideas”

Q Is it just, there was doubt that it would be smart enough to find your security vulnerability issues? Was it the timing wasn't right? People weren't ready. We're in like Concerned about security enough. What do you think it was that created challenges early on? Because looking back, it's like, of course this is going to work. How could it not? It sounds just like a magical all win product.

A First of all, I don't think the challenges were there in terms of the developer adoption. So even when the, even when those first kind of forays into, into self-serve were struggling in terms of breaking into some of the larger customers, The developer adoption, the free user base was still growing at a, at a really good pace. That momentum was just constantly building and it's that momentum that has ultimately fueled the sales led business as we've gone through the years. But it was, it was just those few things I think that I mentioned earlier in terms of stumbling blocks that needed to be overcome because when those first sales and marketing hires did join us and we started having conversations and we also tweaked some of the things in the product to, to meet some You know, add some breath, add some additional languages, ecosystems, build in those table stakes features, then it kind of really unlocked, and there was kind of rocket ship time from then.

AI assessment note: “tweaked some of the things in the product to, to meet some You know, add some breath”

Q Do you have a sense of when that focus expanded to an adjacent group? Like how many years into the growth story that happened, or was there some kind of milestone there? Cause I know everyone imagines. Yeah. We'll expand. The question is when, and when does it make sense? And when is it too early? Do you have any insights into that phase?

A Yeah, for sure. First, I think if we're talking about PLG and the story with sneak, and I actually liked that definition of, um, Product led acquisition from Julian Shapiro when he, when you spoke with him and beyond that maniacal focus on finding product market fit for your product, founders really should be thinking about how their product is going to grow. And that's important, of course, as you think about taking that, that next step. So let's assume in a simplistic definition that you found product market fit as demonstrated by a strong retention. And then the real question is where are the new users for your product going to come from? And, and founders really should have I think strong hypothesis around this. You risk essentially adopting and if they, if we build it, they will come approach. So if your acquisition strategy is product led, then understanding and being intentional about your early acquisition growth loops, I think is an essential founder's responsibility. Dedicating time there to design those loops into the product. It's key. And when I say product, I really mean the whole product experience, considering every touch point in and out of the core application that your users and customers might have with you. Sneak, 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'…

AI assessment note: “understanding and being intentional about your early acquisition growth loops, I think is an essential”