Welcome folks! 👋

This edition of The Product-Led Geek will take 8 minutes to read and you’ll learn:

• What Habit Levers are (and why they're critical for B2B retention)

• How we used them to drive engagement at Snyk

• A 6-step framework to discover your product's Habit Levers

It’s also complete with a ready-to-use template with examples.

Let’s go!

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GEEK OUT

Unlocking Retention: The PLGeek Guide to Habit Levers

Getting users to sign up is only half the battle.

Getting them to stick around and form habits around our product?

That's where the real challenge lies.

We spend a lot of time, energy, and effort on activation.

It's the critical on-ramp to product usage, and we obsess about it (as we should) to ensure new users and teams realise value and form habits quickly.

But if the product isn't designed to cultivate continued engagement past the initial activation milestones, you'll have a leaky bucket.

I’ve written about activation and engagement before, and shared how we tackled it at Snyk, but I haven’t unpacked the specifics of how we thought about driving ongoing engagement with users/teams.

What actions could we influence or use as signals to prompt action in users and teams that predicted ongoing retention?

That is a complex and multi-faceted challenge far beyond simple tactics like notifications.

And it led to the concept I call Habit Levers.

Every successful B2B product has them.

Most teams never identify them.

Today, I'm sharing how we found the Habit Levers at Snyk, and giving you a practical guide to define your own to help you move the needle on both activation and engagement/retention.

Let’s dive in.

Understanding Habit Levers

Let's start with a simple example:

Think about how you use Slack.

Checking channels, responding to messages, and sharing updates becomes ingrained in your daily workflow.

These actions are Slack's Habit Levers - they drive sustained engagement and make the product sticky.

So, what exactly are Habit Levers?

Habit Levers are the specific, role-based actions in a product that, when taken repeatedly, lead to user stickiness and habitual usage.

For example:

• For Slack: Sending messages, checking channels, sharing files

• For Notion: Creating new pages, updating existing docs, sharing with team

• For GitHub: Pushing code, reviewing PRs (pull requests), managing issues

The more a habit lever is ‘pulled’, the greater the likelihood of long-term team retention.

Geek Note: Aren’t these just user actions? Yes and no. They’re the subset of user actions that strongly increase the likelihood of a user/team developing and maintaining a habit around using the product.

When used well, they are the key to driving and maintaining the type of engagement that keeps users and teams coming back, again and again.

In B2B SaaS, you can’t scale if you only solve a problem once for your customer.

To be a business, you have to solve a problem for a customer over and over again, until the use of your product to solve that problem becomes a habit.

Your ability to do that depends on your product design and how well you nurture user and team habit formation.

If a customer isn’t in the habit of using your product to solve their problem, they’re more likely to turn to an alternative.

In most cases that churn is silent and invisible, so by the time you realise it, it's too late.

And it’s not enough to focus on the individual user.

In B2B SaaS, you have to design for team habits too, because that’s what underpins company-wide adoption and expansion.

Habit Levers are crucial for understanding engagement and its relationship to activation.

It’s common for products to have overlaps where the same actions or set of actions can help drive teams toward activation while being habitual if they’re deriving value and are retained.

Snyk’s Product Growth State Model

To illustrate the concept of Habit Levers, let’s look at a growth state model from my time at Snyk.

It’s a good example of how we approached this challenge of defining and improving engagement.

First, a refresher on Product Growth State Models.

In its very simplest form, the model should show new, active, and dormant users/teams, and we count the numbers in each bucket for any given period.

It becomes useful when you break ‘active’ out and split those users/teams into buckets of

• Activated

• Engaged

Breaking engagement down to group users/teams by their degree of engagement (HOW engaged they are) is more useful still.

See here for a deep dive:

What did that look like at Snyk?

We segmented the user/team state from initial signup, through activation, and toward retained usage.

For Snyk, we understood that our users’ and customers’ success (and thus ours) depended on them first

• Connecting their code repositories to Snyk (or another source integration)

• Importing at least one project

• Seeing a non-empty project list

• Viewing at least one detected issue (e.g. vulnerability, license etc), and then

• Remediating at least one issue

The Snyk Activation process had to happen within the first 30 days to be meaningfully predictive of mid-term retention.

It was the moment when a user or team would have clearly demonstrated an ability to realise the value we promised value AND had taken actions predictive of habit formation, hence Activation being synonymous with the Habit milestone.

We also identified two key preceding phases:

• the pre-requisite Setup actions to realise any value (connecting the Source Code Management (SCM) system and importing code repositories)

• the Aha moment that unlocked value for the first time (when they first viewed a vulnerability’s details)

You’ll see our primary activation definition (F30D) was defined as >=1 fix in the first 30 days.

See here for a deep dive on Activation:

But that’s not the end.

We knew that to retain users and teams long-term, they’d need to establish ongoing habits, so we defined engagement states based on how habitually teams fixed vulnerabilities.

These states ranged from

• Casual (1-3 unique days fixing in the last 30), to

• Core (4-7 unique days fixing in the last 30), to

• Progressive (8+ unique days fixing in the last 30)

For a deep dive on Engagement States, check out these posts:

What about the product features / actions that increased activation likelihood and drove teams into (and upward between) these engagement states?

That's where Habit Levers come in.

Habit Levers in Detail

Our data analysis showed that certain repeated actions by users and teams correlated more predictably with moving into the Core and Progressive engagement states.

These became known as Habit Levers, subtly different (but overlapping) for our two core personas:

DevSecOps Actions for Engaged Orgs

• Connect more integrations

• Import more projects

• More Issue Detail Views

• (a few more…)

Developer Actions for Engaged Orgs

• More Issue Detail Views

• More IDE use

• More CLI use

• More Team Invites Sent

• Import more Projects

• Merge more Snyk PRs

• Open more Snyk PRs

• More Ignores Created

• More Issues Fixed Manually

• (again, a few more..)

There’s some overlap, e.g. around Issue Detail views, indicating that these levers can apply across multiple roles (with different volume/frequency), which is a great signal to leverage.

These levers were actions we could directly influence and encourage adoption of (which correlated with long-term engagement), and these activities related to Snyk's core value of helping developers and their teams fix security vulnerabilities.

How To Discover Your Habit Levers

Before we dive into the steps, here's a simple framework to evaluate potential Habit Levers:

• Is it repeatable? (One-time actions don't form habits)

• Is it role-aligned? (Maps to specific user responsibilities)

• Is it value-generating? (Creates or captures value every time)

• Is it measurable? (Can be tracked and influenced)

How do you define your Habit Levers? Here’s a 6-step guide:

1. Identify core users and their needs: Understand your key users and their goals. Pay attention to the Team’s Job To Be Done (JTBD) and the individual’s role within their team.

2. Map out the user journey: Visualise it beyond signup. Start with activation and map out the journey to retained usage.

3. Identify actions that correlate with value: What repeated actions by users and/or their teams show they're progressing through the onboarding and getting value from the product?

4. Define role-specific 'Habit Levers': List candidate levers and classify them based on the roles identified in step 1.

   • It's not always important to have different role-specific actions. Sometimes you want them to do the same thing regardless of role! This step is important in identifying key areas to focus on.

5. Analyse historical data: If you have enough historical data, run regressions to identify the habit lever candidates (and combinations) with the greatest correlation with increased activation, engagement, and mid-term retention.

6. Prioritise, plan, test, and iterate product changes and experiments to get users/teams to pull the habit levers: Plan, test, and iterate as in any growth initiative, capturing both quant and qual signals.

To succeed, start with a solid definition of your product’s core value and align actions to enable that.

Quick Start Template

Here's a template you can use to document your Habit Levers:

1. Lever Name: <Action name>

2. Target Role: <Who should perform this action?>

3. Frequency Goal: <How often should it happen?>

4. Value Created: <What value does this create?>

5. Current Usage: <Baseline metrics>

6. Growth Tactics: <Ideas to increase usage>

Here’s a Google Slides Template you can use:

Tips

• Focus on habits, not one-off wins.

• Connect with users and customers, talk to them and observe them to understand their needs and aspirations.

• You don’t need to boil the ocean; identify a few key levers to start with and build from there.

• Don’t try to have habit levers pulled more frequently than necessary - as aligned with the natural problem frequency.

• Be intentional with your approach and start with a solid plan. It’s a long game.

Conclusion

A focus on Habit Levers moves you beyond the initial activation mindset and into the next step of thinking about engagement as more than a binary state.

By focusing on these actions, you can create more predictable paths to continued and deeper engagement.

It gives you a more actionable plan to drive meaningful impact in activation and ongoing engagement across your user base.

The most sustainable and scalable growth loops leverage ingrained user behaviours as their primary source of fuel - habits.

If your product helps users form those habits, you’ll help them solve the problem that led them to you.

What are your thoughts? What are the habit levers in your product? I’d love to hear your experiences. Email me at [email protected].

THAT’S A WRAP

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That’s all for today,

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Until next time!

— Ben

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