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How Snowflake got to Platform-Market Fit
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Scaling a business is never a one-size-fits-all journey.
As you evolve from startup to scale-up to market leader, your growth strategy needs to shift at every stage.
This is where the 3Ps framework—Problem Market Fit, Product Market Fit, and Platform Market Fit—comes in.
It helps you identify where you are and what steps to take next.
Once you’ve pinpointed your stage, the key is transforming your go-to-market (GTM) strategy to align with your current phase and prepare for the next.
Step 1: Problem Market Fit
At this stage, you're in exploration mode. You’re still figuring out who your ideal customers are, testing segments, and learning what works. Your teams need the freedom to experiment.
Focus: Broad targeting across verticals, upmarket, and downmarket to learn.
Team Approach: Encourage experimentation and autonomy. Sales and marketing teams should be testing messaging, pitches, and campaigns.
Key Metrics: Activity-based metrics, like the number of experiments or customer interactions, help track progress.
Avoid Over-complication: Stick to one or two growth motions (e.g., inbound or outbound). Trying too many channels or strategies can waste resources before you’ve found your ideal segment.
Step 2: Product Market Fit
Now you’ve identified your core buyers—those who love your product, pay for it, renew, and advocate for it. This is the stage to focus and align your teams.
Focus: Narrow in on your best-fit customers and define your ideal segment.
Team Approach: Transition from ad hoc experimentation to coordinated, proactive efforts. Align teams across sales, marketing, customer success, and RevOps to target specific accounts.
Key Metrics: Engagement rates, pipeline coverage, deal velocity, and customer acquisition costs. These help track the efficiency and sustainability of growth.
Expand Growth Engines: Begin exploring additional channels or sales motions, but only once your core segment is solid.
Step 3: Platform Market Fit
In this stage, your existing customers become your most valuable growth lever. You’re optimizing for efficient, scalable growth and focusing on customer lifetime value.
Focus: Deepen relationships with high-value customer cohorts. Invest in plays that drive Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and customer expansion.
Team Approach: Build a strong RevOps function to ensure predictability and scalability. Teams need clear dashboards with metrics like lifetime value, time-to-value, and margins.
Key Metrics: Advanced revenue metrics and customer segmentation data guide decision-making.
The Common Pitfall: Sticking to the Old Playbook
As businesses move from one stage to the next, they often get stuck running their previous GTM strategy. For example, a company in Product Market Fit may still act like it’s in Problem Market Fit—too scattered, too reactive. This creates a “growth stall” where the old tactics limit progress.
To grow, you must recognize when your playbook has become the bottleneck and adapt it to align with your current stage.
How Snowflake Did It
Snowflake is a masterclass in how to evolve through the 3 P’s.
To dig in more, we’ll reference not only the 3 P framework but the 8 essential questions that match up with the pillars of the GTM Operating System:
Where can you grow the most?
Which product(s) create the highest customer value?
How will you engage your customer with a differentiated point of view (PoV)?
Which GTM motions get you to your revenue goal faster?
What’s your ROI in the customers’ mind?
How else can you upserve your customers?
Which GTM metrics drive your business health?
How do you give your team clarity, alignment, and trust?
Snowflake’s journey is mapped across the three P’s—and in each stage, the 8 key GTM questions were answered differently based on the growth levers, customer needs, and team dynamics of the moment.
In the early days of Problem-Market Fit (2012–2016), Snowflake was laser-focused on fixing a broken data warehouse problem for cloud-native startups. It was all about founder-led clarity, speed, and a tight feedback loop with early adopters.
As they reached Product–Market Fit (2016–2021), under Frank Slootman's leadership, the company shifted toward operational excellence and enterprise readiness. This phase introduced OKRs, rigorous prioritization, and a new GTM motion focused on land-and-expand via partnerships and cloud co-sell.
Now, in the Platform–Market Fit era (2021–Present), Snowflake operates as a full-fledged ecosystem. GTM is driven by platform-level thinking: native apps, AI tools, and global data-sharing marketplaces. Leadership alignment, execution intensity, and hybrid motions (product-led, sales-led, and ecosystem-led) define how Snowflake scales today. NRR is 130%+.
This 8-question GTM Operating System framework mapped against the 3 P’s, provides a powerful blueprint for any company navigating growth.
Whether you’re a founder/CEO building for fit or a CMO scaling an ecosystem, these questions can anchor your strategy—and evolve with you as your market, product, and team mature.
Learn More about the 3 P’s in GTM University
In the newly-launched GTM University, you can take a course just on the 3 P’s and learn how to map where you are or you can sign up to learn about all elements of the GTM Operating System.
Two ways to check it out:
A single course (like the one on the 3P’s)
Access to GTMU - the courses, frameworks, templates, and mastermind calls is $1499/year
Now, if you’ve ever thought:
“I don’t know which playbook to run.”
“I’m overwhelmed with change.”
“I need clarity, not noise.”
GTM University is for you.
The GTM University membership gives you access to:
Monthly curated masterminds.
Every course, every framework, every template.
Latest GTM insights and original research with benchmarks.
The full GTM OS curriculum (like the Three P’s, OS Pillars, and more).
Because we believe this deeply:
personal growth is great, but team transformation is how businesses truly change.
"The GTM Operating System is the most powerful model on the market, and I’d love nothing more than to see it become the go-to standard for all GTM leaders." — Mary Kay Evans, CMO of Alida, a $60M+ company and growing!
Just like MK, hundreds of forward thinking Founders, CEOs, GTM leaders, and teams are already using GTM University to build the system that finally matches their ambitions.
Let’s go. 🚀
Love,
Bryan and Sangram
