Impact and Learnings Review

A team ceremony that prioritizes learnings over status updates to drive continuous improvement

Ben Williams
How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut

Impact and Learnings Review

"If I had to pick one meeting that as the most important in the growth team, it would be this. The teams continuously document any learnings from data exploration, from experimentation, from user research and so on." - Ben Williams

What It Is

A weekly team ceremony (and monthly group ceremony) focused entirely on discussing learnings rather than status updates. Inspired by a Brian Balfour blog post from his HubSpot days, this meeting institutionalizes learning as the core currency of growth work.

The key insight: experimentation is about generating learnings that can be leveraged to deliver outcomes—not about delivering outcomes directly. Without good process, learnings end up unused and gathering dust.

How It Works

Weekly Team-Level Review (PM-led)

Pre-meeting: Teams continuously document learnings in a weekly "impact and learnings document"

  • Learnings from data exploration
  • Learnings from experimentation
  • Learnings from user research
  • Anyone who contributed a learning documents it

During the meeting:

  • Most time: Discussing documented learnings, their implications, how to leverage in follow-up work
  • Some time: Reviewing key metrics (some teams split this into a separate meeting)
  • No time: Reviewing what the team has been doing (status updates)

Key discussion questions:

  • What are the implications of this learning?
  • How can we leverage it in follow-up work?
  • Where might this have relevance to other teams?

Monthly Group-Level Review (Director-led)

All growth teams come together to:

  • Share key learnings with potential relevance across teams
  • Surface developer insights from user research team
  • Recorded and socialized with rest of company

Sharing Beyond Growth

  • Dedicated Slack channels for sharing experiment plans and learnings
  • Invite collaboration on experiment plans before running them
  • User research team shares "developer insights" at monthly reviews
  • Recordings shared company-wide

How to Apply It

  1. Create the document - Establish a weekly "impact and learnings" doc where anyone can document learnings from any source

  2. Shift meeting focus - Ruthlessly cut status updates. If people want to know what the team did, they can check async. Meetings are for discussing implications.

  3. Require documentation before discussion - Learnings must be written down before the meeting, not shared verbally for the first time

  4. Assign facilitation - PM facilitates, but anyone who contributed a learning presents it and leads discussion

  5. Add group-level cadence - Monthly, bring teams together to share learnings with cross-team relevance

  6. Socialize widely - Record meetings, share broadly. "People can't know if something is useful to them if you haven't shared it."

When to Use It

  • Weekly for any team doing experimentation or discovery work
  • Monthly for groups with multiple teams doing related work
  • When learnings are getting lost or not being leveraged
  • When teams are focused on outputs rather than outcomes
  • When experimentation feels like busywork rather than progress

Source

  • Guest: Ben Williams
  • Episode: "How Snyk built a product-led growth juggernaut"
  • Key Discussion: (01:07:26) - Detailed explanation of the ceremony and its importance
  • YouTube: Watch on YouTube

Related Frameworks

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