Ben Williams: commitment

Transcript context

…Where did you initially focus that team? Which part of the flywheel? Right now we have dedicated teams focused on acquisition, activation and monetization along with a supporting team who own our growth platform, including all of our data and experimentation stack. But the macro structure, it's changed over time to enable us to focus on the biggest constraints in our growth model. At the beginning we just focused on acquisition and activation, intentionally deferring any investment into specific monetization initiatives around the self-serve revenue channel until we felt confident that A, we'd built the necessary growth muscles to scale, and B, we'd figured out some of the more pressing issues that were present earlier in the user journey. It was important that we felt really confident about our ability to effectively connect developers to Snyk's value in such a way that introducing and optimizing a self-serve revenue channel would make sense. I also really wanted to avoid one of the common failure modes I've seen around cross-functional collaboration and growth. When I joined, there was an inherent tension built into the system. It was particularly noticeable between R&D and the growth marketing team. We had amazing people in both teams, a ton of really great ideas, but many of them were just not being executed on and it was leading to a lot of friction, a lot of frustration, ultimately caused by misaligned incentives between the different functions. 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, and a basic shape of the growth teams that'll be familiar to most, but I spoke to a bunch of people over the last couple of years and I've actually learned to my surprise that inclusion of growth marketers in the product teams is not all that common. And I personally think there's just a lot of opportunity being missed there and I expect that to start to become the norm rather than the exception over time. Okay. I want to talk about that, but before we get there, you said there's a decision science person on the team. What is that about? That's cool.…

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