Announcing organizational updates to better serve our customers

Earlier today, we informed the Snyk team of important recent organizational updates to better serve our customers and improve operational efficiency in order to support our continued growth. In the spirit of transparency to our customers, investors and partners, we are also sharing this internal memo below.

Snykers –

My foremost responsibility is to ensure that our employees, customers and investors are best set up for long-term success, with the confidence that they’re investing their money, talents and time into a company built to last.

In order to stay ahead of the incredible market demand for developer security, we’ve gone through an extended period of hypergrowth. In roughly the last 18 months alone, we’ve grown our customer base by more than 100%, tripled our team size, acquired six companies and expanded our developer security platform to five products.

Much of this success was achieved in a favorable economy, but we must now together navigate looming economic headwinds to advance our continued growth. To ensure we’re in the best possible position to thrive under these new circumstances, we collectively must embrace an evolved mindset that balances profitability with continued top line growth. 

To this end, today I’m sharing details around some important recent changes we’ve made to the Snyk team as well as my view on the company’s path forward.

The changes we’ve made

Aligning Snyker roles and responsibilities for the future

Under the leadership of Chief People Officer, Adriana Bokel Herde, we have sharpened the company’s overall focus to create a long lasting, high-performing company culture. We have increased our discipline and consistency in assessing our team’s skills to ensure that we scale effectively and have the right people in the right roles going forward. As a result, over the last quarter, we made changes to the Snyk team impacting approximately 5 percent of our total workforce worldwide.

While these were difficult decisions, they were made with our shared values in mind. We appreciate these former Snykers and their contributions during an important period in our journey and support their future success.

Better meeting customer needs: evolving our R&D and GTM organizations

With the understanding that our customers are at the heart of our vision to secure the digital world, Patrick Poels, SVP, Engineering, Aner Mazur, Chief Product Officer, and Dino DiMarino, Chief Revenue Officer, recently realigned their organizations, allowing their teams to be more effective in meeting customer needs.

In short, the R&D organization has restructured our Product division into two focused teams: Application Products and Cloud Products. In addition, the team formerly known as “Engines” internally is now the Security division, dedicating focus on Snyk's value to the security professional.

On the go-to-market side, we have reoriented his team to laser focus on three key priorities: retaining current customers, acquiring new customers and expanding our existing business. To this end, we’ve moved to a new customer experience model that brings our solution engineering and customer success groups into our unified GTM organization which will help us become an even more powerful team. We’ve also deliberately separated the teams that drive two critical, equally important motions: acquiring new customers and driving expansion within our current customer base.

Cash flow positive acceleration

Having learned the many hard lessons of the dotcom crash, Great Financial Crisis and COVID pandemic, Ken MacAskill and our seasoned Leadership Team have consistently operated as a financially disciplined, mature company.

This is why we’ve accelerated our plans by a full year to become free cash flow positive in 2024. This will place us in a stronger position to take advantage of current market challenges, exiting this volatile period stronger than ever.

Looking forward: a more resilient company

I recently participated in a podcast where the interviewer posed a provocative question, “What trait do you hope to instill in your children?” Without hesitation, I answered with one word: resilience.

The hard truth is that becoming resilient cannot be taught. Ultimately resilience is hard earned. Only after weathering the many unexpected ups and downs of every life (and career), can one truly experience and appreciate its value.

We have made the changes detailed above in order to fortify Snyk to be a more resilient business moving forward, better able to withstand the uncertainties thrown at us by this or any future macro environment.

It’s also important to remember that the category we pioneered, developer security, is still in its early stages. By increasing our focus and consistently putting our customers first, we’ll continue to grow in a scalable, efficient manner in both the near- and long-term.

In the past, I’ve asked Snykers to be humble in celebration. I now ask you to be resilient by embracing today’s challenges as valuable opportunities to learn and grow. With these changes now in place, I’m confident that we’ll continue to learn and grow as one team, fulfilling our ultimate mission to empower every one of the world’s developers to continue their pace of innovation securely.

Best,

Peter