The Product-Led Geek

Advising B2B SaaS startups in all things PLG, Product, Growth, Strategy

Advisor (PLG / Product / Growth)

neptune.ai

Advisor

Reforge

Appearing as a featured guest in Reforge live programs (Growth Leadership, PLG)

Featured Program Guest (PLG, Growth Leadership)

Supporting content development for Reforge PLG program

Program Council Member (PLG)

TryHackMe

Gearset

CyberArk

Bleach Cyber

Beyond Identity

Panaseer

Helping B2B SaaS founders win with PLG | Snyk, CloudBees | Follow me to learn how to scale your startup with product-led growth and product-led sales.

I spent 20+ years building, nurturing and scaling high-performing product and cross-functional growth teams.

I now help founders and product growth leaders at developer tool and other B2B SaaS companies to create sustainable, defensible growth through PLG and PLS.

My expertise, experience and proven growth systems across acquisition, retention and monetisation levers allow me to help you with

→ Defining and improving activation and engagement as inputs to better retention
→ Layering on a PLG motion to bring GTM efficiency to existing sales-led business
→ Establishing and scaling Product-Led Sales (PLS) to increase close rates and ACVs
→ Creating effective user onboarding to minimise time-to-value
→ Developing growth and/or product strategy
→ Identifying, documenting, standing up and quantifying growth loops
→ Building qualitative and quantitative growth models
→ Developing improved product and growth leadership muscle
→ Starting and scaling growth teams
→ Designing and implementing growth process
→ Implementing appropriate data and analytics infrastructure
→ Establishing experimentation (A/B, multivariate) programs
→ Selecting and implementing effective product & growth platforms & tools
→ Implementing product management process and best practice
→ Cultivating and coaching high-performing teams

If you want to get weekly advice on the systems behind product-led success, you can join my newsletter:

→ GO HERE: plg.news

If you wan't to explore an advising engagement visit my site:

→ GO HERE: plgeek.com

Twitter: @theplgeek
TikTok: @theplgeek
Instagram: @theplgeek
YouTube: @theplgeek

Ben Williams

Clutton Associates Ltd

Working with clients on transitions and transformations in fractional technology leadership, advisory or consultative roles. Clients include: 

* Open University
* Public Digital
* Mettler Toledo
* Healx

Principal (Fractional CTO, Trainer, Advisor and Coach)

Snyk

Supporting Product Led Growth (PLG, user acquisition, activation and monetisation), Developer Experience (IDEs, SCM integrations, and more) and just in time developer education.

VP of Engineering

Supporting the engineering efforts around Product Led Growth (PLG) across the Snyk portfolio.

Senior Director of Software Engineering

VMware

Senior Director, VMware Pivotal Labs

Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH)

Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Member for VMware

Pivotal Labs

Responsible for running the European business focused on the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands. 

Managing over 100 cross-functional staff made up of software engineers, solution architects, product managers, user experience designers, program managers, transformation consultants, data scientists and regional leaders. 

Returned a profit whilst needing to close practices and also creating new service offerings
Collaborating with sales colleagues on business development and client pitching, act as a sponsor and point of escalation for engagements

Collaborate with People team to revise and standardise hiring practices, introduce consistent promotion processes

Senior Director, EMEA

As the Pivotal Labs Director for London, I was responsible for leading the application development consultancy practice. Responsibilities include supporting sales efforts to win business, managing client engagements, recruitment and supporting practice leadership for the staff. Responsible for 50 practitioners including software engineers, product managers, product designers and data scientists. During this time we engaged on the UKs leading financial services, retail and automotive organisations as well as supporting international business and local startups.

Director, UK

As part of the New York leadership team, my responsibilities include business development and sales including securing over $600,000 in new business and over $300,000 in extensions with existing clients. My role also includes account management during an engagement, ensuring the success of the project alongside recruitment, managing project staffing and line management. I continued with this role with my relocation to London in August 2014 where I’ve helped grow a smaller office.

Associate Director

As a consultant engineer, the role included working with clients such as startups, non-profits and multi-nations, helping clients launch new products, improve robustness and replace legacy or paper-based systems. Pivotal Labs adopts the XP flavour of agile, including pair programming, test driven development (TDD, BDD), sustainable pace, continuous integration as well as continuous delivery and lean product management. The primary technologies I worked with were Ruby on Rails, JavaScript and PostgreSQL often hosted on Heroku or Cloud Foundry installations. I took on the engineering manager within 9 months of joining. The role includes direct line management and mentoring of upto 10 software engineers from recent graduates to seasoned consultants as well as interviewing engineering candidates.

Software Engineer

GORUCO

GORUCO is a one-day technical conference aimed at highly motivated programmers.

Co-Organizer

The Guardian

Lead the engineering team for the new live blogging editorial tools which were becoming increasingly important for coverage of national and international events. The application was built separately from the primary editorial tools but provided a seamless experience for readers. These tools were built using Scala and MongoDB; built using XP practices such as test driven development (TDD) and pair programming, and was hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Prior to the live blog tools, I worked as an engineer modernising the identity platform which developed and deployed a dark launch, lazy migration replacement of a TCL/Oracle system that could not be changed for fear of breaking something unknown. This allowed for the development of reader facing features such as signing in via social networks as well as taking the first step in creating a unified view of the readers for teams across the Guardian. The platform was built using Java and MongoDB. I also lead the recruitment of the first graduate scheme for nine years and kicked off internal hack days with closer collaboration with different editorial departments.

The Team Brand Design

Specialising in server side web technologies, I created several web sites for Enterprise and government clients.  I worked along side the designers and front end developers to deliver our projects.  I also worked on building single page event-driven jQuery based Javascript web applications.   

As a lead developer, I have also implemented strategies to move deployments to the cloud and introduce agile and software engineering practices to the development group such as kanban boards, story/issue tracking tools, continuous integration and automated deployments.

Joining as a graduate, I moved around several teams working on two major initiatives, 21CN Cloud Computing and the CNET award winning (see http://is.gd/CJJVBX) Web21C telephony APIs. I was also a member of a technical due diligence team for an acquisition of USD $105m in 2008, and facilitated a joint BT and Microsoft student competition, The Imagine Cup Innovation Accelerator hosted at the Microsoft offices in California, February 2008.

The Cloud Computing project aimed to replace costly vendor driven solutions with an open source and custom developed platform. Using a distributed, peer-to-peer (P2P) design the team built Amazon Web Services (AWS) API compatible compute and storage applications. I also lead a rotation based devops team providing first and second line support as well as building associated tools for supporting the platform. The platform supported over 1,000 simultaneously running instances and reduced server provisioning time from weeks to minutes.

On the Web21C project, I worked on the voice team to build and support a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) application server which managed over a million call minutes a month on a single server. The team also built web based call control APIs for managing calls, conferences along with a mechanism to include interactive voice response (IVR) within customer applications.

Lloyds TSB

Internship/Placement working on in-house tools using VB6 such as database conversion utilities, code diff tools and booking systems.

Software Developer

Fractional CTO/VPE, coach and Red Teamer

Adaptable software engineering leader, architect, and manager with experience working on different verticals across markets. Opinionated, driven and enjoyable to work with. Agile practitioner with all the trimmings. Hired, built and run teams over 100 people (not resources).

taplio

The Battle

Ben Williams

Robbie Clutton

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?