The Impacts & Learnings Review
The one meeting a growth team can't skip: discuss learnings and implications, never status.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 94%
Williams' single most important growth-team meeting. Teams continuously document learnings from data exploration, experimentation and user research into a weekly impacts-and-learnings document. The meeting is spent discussing those learnings, their implications, how they can be leveraged in follow-up work, and where they are relevant to other teams. A smaller slice covers key metrics. Zero time is spent on what the team has been doing. The same meeting runs monthly at group level, where each team surfaces only the learnings with cross-team utility.
Origin
Ben Williams (VP of Product, Snyk) says the ceremony is loosely modeled on a blog post Brian Balfour wrote roughly six years earlier about a similar ceremony from his HubSpot days.
Core principles
- 01Learnings are the means; impact is the end. Focus on the path and the impact follows.
- 02Status updates are not learnings — allocate zero time to what people did.
- 03A learning nobody hears is a learning that gathers dust.
- 04The person who generated the learning presents it, not the manager.
- 05Learnings from failures and mistakes get socialized as widely as wins.
How to run it
- 1
Maintain a running impacts-and-learnings document
Every team continuously documents any learning from data exploration, experimentation, and user research into a weekly impacts and learnings document. Some teams pair up and go into dedicated learning sessions to deep dive on specific topics, feeding the output back into the doc.
Pro tip Snyk keeps experiment plans, the knowledge base and user research base in Airtable, alongside Slack channels where running experiments are visible and open to collaboration.
- 2
Run the team-level review, PM-facilitated
Held weekly and usually run by the PM — but only as a facilitator. Each person who contributed a learning presents it themselves and leads the discussion.
Watch out If the PM narrates everyone else's learnings, you have rebuilt a status meeting.
- 3
Spend the time on implications, not results
Most of the meeting discusses the documented learnings, their implications, how they can be leveraged in follow-up work, and where they might be relevant to other teams. A relatively smaller part covers key metrics — some teams split metrics into a separate meeting entirely. No time at all goes to reviewing what the team has been doing.
Pro tip Splitting the metrics review out entirely is a good forcing function if the meeting keeps drifting to numbers.
- 4
Roll it up monthly at group level
The same meeting runs monthly across all growth teams, run by the product, engineering or marketing director for the group. Teams do not share everything — they pick the specific learnings with potential relevance and utility across other teams. Whoever generated the learning (engineer, tech lead, designer or PM) presents it.
Pro tip Snyk includes a standing agenda item for the user research team to share 'developer insights'.
- 5
Record and socialize company-wide
The group-level meeting is open (a salesperson can attend), always recorded, and socialized with the rest of the company afterwards, so learnings reach the go-to-market teams who can act on them.
Pro tip People can't know something is useful to them if you haven't shared it with them — default to over-sharing, including failures.
In the wild
Weekly, each growth team runs a PM-facilitated impacts and learnings review off a continuously maintained document, discussing implications rather than activity. Monthly, all growth teams convene under a growth-group director, each surfacing only the learnings with cross-team relevance, plus a standing developer-insights slot from user research. The session is recorded and shared company-wide.
→ Learnings — including those from mistakes and failures — flow out of growth and into R&D and go-to-market teams, and the growth org's insight model came to power Snyk's entire product-led sales process.
Common mistakes
Treating learnings as the deliverable
Leaders rightly push back on 'we learned a lot but nothing shipped'. Impact is the goal; learnings are how you get there step by step. Set KPI outcomes as the output and learnings as the input.
Letting the meeting become a status review
Once the meeting reports what people did, it stops generating leverage. Snyk allocates zero time to activity and most of its time to implications and cross-team relevance.
Keeping the learnings inside growth
Insights from growth often have utility far beyond growth — but only if socialized widely and visibly, recorded, and made attendable by anyone including salespeople.
Is it for you?
Best for
Growth and product leaders running experiment-heavy teams whose experiment results currently die in a Slack thread or a closed ticket.
Not ideal for
Teams running no experiments and doing no user research — there is nothing to review, and the meeting will collapse into status.
From the transcript
“if I had to pick one meeting that as the most important in the growth team it would be this”
“and then no time at all is spent reviewing what the team have actually been doing it's more on kind of the outcomes and the…”
“the learnings made in the growth teams even those from mistakes or failures we socialize them widely and visibly”
“if you focus on the things you need in terms of learnings to take you step by step that will pave the path to to…”
From the episode
How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut
Ben Williams (VP of Product at Snyk)