Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup ever | Geoff Charles
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- Опубліковано 28 тра 2024
- Geoff Charles is VP of Product at Ramp-the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time, Fast Company’s #1 Most Innovative Company in North America, and a company I believe we should all study for how they operate, execute, and hire. At Ramp, Geoff has led the product team from the early days, including the development and release of 60+ products and features in the past year alone. He has been building financial services for over a decade, and his interview in Lenny’s Newsletter quickly became one of the most widely read newsletter issues of all time. In today’s podcast, we will discuss:
• How velocity is at the heart of Ramp’s culture and success
• How writing can unlock clarity, creativity, and rapid problem-solving
• How to empower your product team through context sharing
• How to practically approach problems from first principles
• How Ramp approaches hiring in a unique way
• Suggestions for breaking into the world of product management
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Find the full transcript at: www.lennyspodcast.com/velocit...
Where to find Geoff Charles:
• Twitter: / geoffintech
• LinkedIn: / geoffrey-charles
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: / lennysan
• LinkedIn: / lennyrachitsky
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Geoff’s background
(04:49) An overview of Ramp
(06:20) The importance of velocity at Ramp
(08:50) Single-threaded goals and how to keep teams away from distractions
(13:20) Setting lofty goals
(15:17) How Ramp empowers teams
(17:37) How Geoff’s management style has evolved at Ramp
(19:55) The product design process at Ramp
(21:19) Ramp’s system for sharing feedback
(23:07) How Ramp handles bug fixes
(24:15) Advice for PMs who want to move faster
(29:29) Why velocity and impact can help protect against burnout
(32:33) Planning vs. doing
(37:54) Ramp’s strategy documents
(40:55) Finding your unique positioning
(42:46) OKRs
(44:53) The importance of first-principle thinking
(48:53) How to use writing to think through problems
(51:46) How Geoff carves out time for deep work
(54:05) How Geoff manages tasks and stays organized
(57:15) Why other roles share the PM load at Ramp
(1:00:30) PM responsibilities at Ramp
(1:01:46) Identifying A+ talent
(1:06:02) The skills Ramp looks for when hiring
(1:07:33) Advice for people wanting to break into product management
(1:10:37) Lightning round
Referenced:
• How Ramp builds product: www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/ho...
• Bill: www.bill.com/
• Expensify: www.expensify.com/
• Concur: www.concur.com/
• Coupa: www.coupa.com/
• Nicole Forsgren on Lenny’s Podcast: www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-...
• Sheryl Sandberg on LinkedIn: / sheryl-sandberg-5126652
• Getting Things Done: www.amazon.com/Getting-Things...
• When Breath Becomes Air: www.amazon.com/When-Breath-Be...
• The Bear on Hulu: www.hulu.com/series/the-bear-...
• Whoop: www.whoop.com/
Production and marketing by penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
Lenny, you're not asking tough / challenging questions. Vision alignment requires PM to perform their roles, not offload their responsibilities to the engg. team. If PMs are the ones going off talking to customers then why is the engg. team responsible for it. Also it seems PMs are being setup to fail if they're being hired as PM and then expected NOT to be a PM but rather a middle manager or worse a non technical engg. manager. Being overly agreeable to whatever your guests say just creates an echo chamber. I'd rather play devil's advocate.
I wish this guy was on my team. He gets it.
That was the best ending I’ve heard yet. Total class act.
This is one of the few companies that Marty Cagan would actually put as an example of doing things the right way.
10:32 Talking about how he just doesn’t tell about the product. It’s not about secrecy but avoiding distractions. When you are building something, the biggest task is to stick to it. The ability to stick to it comes easy when you are excited about it. But if someone else is also working on something you are excited about, you would want to go there as well. Of course, this is manageable if you self control. While the team individuals are learning self control you have to also help them by not telling them.
This also links to how if you have the ability to digest (or focus) you will be given more opportunities to lose focus.
There is a lot to admire about how Geoff thinks. I like one idea: optimize everything for speed.
Great, amazingly simple, clear and intersting conversation! THANK U!!!
This interview was brain candy. Excellent!
Ome of the best interviews on this channel for me. I love when other people do stuff the same way that I do and especially if they tend to be higher up in successful companies
11:33 single threaded extreme - giving one project, one person, one room.
12:28 Dedicated Firefighters for firefighting. Developers for fighting bugs, separate from teams who are building. Same for product manager focused on documentation (maintenance) Vs priority (building)
If you build correctly, maintenance is going to be less.
still working! Thanks!
Love this!
17:00 To move fast, you have to tell your team repeatedly - to move. That’s your job as a leader.
Leader’s Job - Repeater in Chief .
It’s important because you are also aware of the new changes and ensure the team’s focus stays put.
13:44 Interesting. Ambition can burn people out. How to tackle that?
Geoff Charles / Ramp’s approach to motivating people is to
- challenge markets.
- design the future - what does the future of this product looks like? Figma or going back to the blackboards.
Doesn’t point out how to avoid burnout. But his approach to motivation is also interesting. Compete with someone, build your own future.
15:43 Context Vs Micro managing. I am currently micro managing
16:11 what is the goal you are going after, what’s the hypothesis to achieve that goal, what’s the data for the hypothesis and solutions to test the hypothesis?
16:37 instead of the solutions, debate the approach, hypothesis
17:18 most of the time repeating myself 😂
13:25 love this idea. Let’s 10X the goal. Now tell me what is the strategy and what do you require from me. On the similar lines of Peter Thiel’s idea of 10 year goal in 1 year.
Man, I was part of a team which did 2 scrums a day, 1 hour each with 20+ people in each meeting
20+ people is crazy but its clear standups are happening at Ramp very frequently
@@Pharoah2 Miss those small 6 member teams where standups were like a casual talk at random times.
i would love to know what may be different about how the engineering teams operate at Ramp compared to Geoff Charles former teams. As an engineer team lead I'm hyper-focused on ways-of-working.
When I hear the statements about A+ engineering teams compared to B+ engineering teams, could how Ramp operates be what takes B+ teams and allows them to operate in a new way that shifts them to that A+ level?
Not sure if there will be a chance for an answer but I'll try anyways. The biggest bottleneck to velocity in my teams is design. designers love to stall things and say they need to do more research. How do you infuse velocity in UXers? On one hand we don't want them to be screen factories that just follow whatever PMs say/sketch but on the other, when we give them time and autonomy, they research research research and nothing useful comes out.
Should we just get new UXers?
18:35 Roadmap + Strategy = Contract.
PMs goal: continue giving context, to build stuff
Team’s goals: highlight the one way decisions.
21:36 Because you can fix things quickly, product quality goes up as your product deployment velocity increases - increase the Dev speed and the overall product increases, faster iterations…
21:36 it’s also about clarity - everyone is so clear about what’s the risks, actions and type of feedback required, even the higher level “who”s can rely on beginner “who”s as they can see what these guys are Upto.
22:11 Feedback System / Process.
22:41 VOC directly assigned to engineers. For better priory and context.
23:29 You can to work on new features until previous bugs are fixed. Fix half working things first - so that new things are built better.
"Shipping things that don't work," and they don't have a bug backlog? How??
Great talk but i'm not sure i get how insisting on velocity doesn't end up forcing people to take shortcuts, create code debt and bugs
10:55 multitasking in the coding world is rare. Build APIs and building UIs parallely is difficult. Do on thing at a time. For a week. Or at least a day. Understand the person’s capability.
It all comes to three things: vision , A players, money…
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