Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product)
Jeff Charles, VP of Product at RAMP, shares how the fastest-growing SaaS business in history operationalizes a culture of velocity, empowering small, single-threaded teams with lofty goals. He details RAMP's unique approach to product development, talent acquisition, and sustainable high-impact work by focusing on first principles and context over control.
Deep Dive Analysis
17 Topic Outline
Ramp's Overview and Unprecedented Growth
The Centrality of Velocity in Ramp's Culture
Operationalizing Single-Threaded Focus for Teams
Setting Lofty Goals and Leveraging Design for Motivation
Empowering Product Teams Through Context Over Control
Ramp's Approach to Product Reviews and Quality Control
Advice for Product Managers on Increasing Velocity
Velocity and Impact as Burnout Prevention
Balancing Planning and Doing for Rapid Execution
Ramp's Strategy Document and Right to Win
Ramp's Perspective on OKRs
Applying First Principles Thinking in a Complex Business
The Role of Writing in Thinking and Problem Solving
Strategies for Deep Work and Task Management
Ramp's Lean PM Team and Distributed Product Ownership
Identifying A+ Talent in Engineering and Design
Hiring Philosophy and Advice for Aspiring PMs
5 Key Concepts
Velocity
Velocity at Ramp is the core principle guiding product development, team incentives, hiring, promotion, decision-making, and organizational structure. It emphasizes building, shipping, and iterating quickly to achieve impact, attract top talent, and de-risk decisions by making the cost of those decisions low.
Single-Threaded Focus
This refers to teams or individuals concentrating on only one goal or 'thread' at a time. It involves removing all other distractions, research, production engineering, or processes outside that single goal, allowing for dedicated execution and faster progress.
Context Over Control
This management philosophy prioritizes providing teams with the necessary context—goals, hypotheses, data, and potential solutions—rather than micromanaging solutions. It empowers teams closer to the ground to make better decisions, fostering alignment and trust.
First Principles Thinking
This approach involves going back to the fundamentals of a problem rather than pattern-matching from past experiences. It requires deep thinking and a willingness to set aside prior expertise, especially when dealing with unique or unprecedented business challenges.
Product Operations
A dedicated team at Ramp that handles the operational functions of product development, including project management, issue management, release management, enablement, content, beta programs, and customer research. This offloads low-leverage work from PMs, allowing them to focus on strategy.
9 Questions Answered
Ramp was one of the fastest-growing fintech and B2B SaaS companies of all time, hitting $100 million in annual revenue in its first two years and continuing significant growth since then.
Ramp's recipe for velocity involves constantly having small teams with a single-threaded focus, providing them with necessary resources, setting big, lofty goals with tight timelines, and shielding them from organizational chaos until they find product-market fit.
Ramp empowers teams by prioritizing context over control, aligning on goals, hypotheses, and data, and trusting teams closer to the ground to devise solutions. Leaders focus on sharing context and coaching, while teams highlight risks and one-way decisions.
Ramp maintains quality through control mechanisms like voice of customer processes (sharing negative reviews monthly), reporting NPS and CSAT, tracking operational overhead (tickets per user), and directly assigning bugs to on-call engineers for immediate fixes. If metrics are in the red, teams must fix issues before shipping new features.
Ramp believes velocity can help avoid burnout by ensuring people feel impactful and proud of their work, rather than putting effort into things that don't move. The key is for everyone to feel ownership over their goals and solutions, preventing work from feeling like it's being pushed onto them.
Ramp prioritizes doing over extensive planning, accepting a degree of chaos as a trade-off for innovation and customer value. Planning is focused on high-value, large market moments (like marketing calendars), while individual teams operate autonomously with less accuracy needed for specific feature timelines.
Writing is used as a primary tool for deep thinking and clarifying complex problems. Geoff recommends starting with a simple question on paper and thinking through it deeply before seeking external answers, which helps increase one's capacity to think clearly and communicate effectively.
The core PM job at Ramp includes team building within the pod, ensuring the team maintains focus, navigating and protecting the team from external stakeholders, acting as a central point of contact, and bringing in the right people at the right time.
Ramp looks for individuals with a strong desire for impact, evidenced by their past achievements or reasons for seeking new roles (e.g., leaving due to slow pace or bureaucracy). They also highly value the ability to think deeply, assessing how candidates make decisions and approach trade-offs, often prioritizing these over specific past experience.
43 Actionable Insights
1. Ramp’s Core Operational Model
Organize small, single-threaded teams with big, lofty goals and tight timelines, giving them necessary resources and shielding them from organizational chaos until they find product-market fit. This approach enables rapid execution and innovation by allowing teams to focus intensely on building, shipping, and iterating.
2. Empower Teams with Context
Align teams upstream on goals, hypotheses, and data rather than being prescriptive about solutions. Provide continuous context to help teams make better decisions, as solutions are best derived by those closest to the ground.
3. Invest in A+ R&D Talent
Ensure top-down investment in R&D as a first-class citizen by paying upmarket, hiring the best, and focusing on your engineering and tech brand. This attracts empowered talent and forms the backbone of high velocity and quality.
4. Think from First Principles
Approach problems by going back to fundamentals and thinking deeply, rather than pattern-matching from past experiences. This is crucial for unique businesses or when facing challenges that haven’t been done before.
5. Prioritize Velocity Over Planning
Spend more time doing and less time on excessive planning, as accuracy has a cost. Focus planning accuracy only on high-value, large market moments, and let the rest be more autonomous to maximize execution speed.
6. Make Work Meaningful to Team
Align teams on shared goals and empower them to solve problems, fostering a sense of ownership over their ‘mini-company.’ This approach helps radically avoid burnout by making work feel thrilling and personally impactful.
7. Writing to Clarify Thinking
Shut down your laptop, take out paper, write a simple question, and spend time thinking deeply to answer it. Writing clearly helps you think clearly and increases your capacity to solve complex problems.
8. Eliminate Unnecessary Meetings
Kill status meetings and unimportant processes, conducting statuses asynchronously and in real-time within operational systems. Reserve meetings for collaboration, ideation, and decision-making to avoid demotivating teams and wasting time.
9. Focus on Clear Trade-offs
Clearly communicate trade-offs to leadership by presenting what the team is doing versus not doing, and why, offering a menu of items for them to choose from. This increases velocity by ensuring focus on fewer, high-impact initiatives.
10. Shield Teams from Chaos
Implement protective layers like rotational production engineering programs and product operators to shield core teams from escalations, bugs, documentation, and customer requests. This allows teams to maintain single-threaded focus on their main goals.
11. Set Clear Expectations for Chaos
Inform new joiners upfront that prioritizing velocity means some chaos, shipping imperfect things, and constant changes. This manages expectations and ensures people are welcoming of the dynamic environment.
12. Support Reports to Product
Have the support team report directly into product, operating under the first principle that every support ticket signifies a product failure. This holds the product team accountable for customer issues and drives continuous improvement.
13. Founders Focus on Hiring
Early on, founders should prioritize hiring the best engineers and designers above all else, including product strategy or revenue. This creates a compounding effect, attracting more top talent and forming a strong foundation for future growth.
14. Single-Threaded Team Focus
Assign teams only one goal or ’thread’ to focus on, removing all other distractions like research, production engineering, or external processes. This ensures maximum concentration and efficiency towards a single objective.
15. Lofty Goals Motivation
Motivate teams with ambitious goals by leveraging market comparables and inspiring visionary designs. Designers should craft compelling Figma prototypes and loom walkthroughs to showcase the future product, keeping teams anchored and excited.
16. Leader as Repeater-in-Chief
As a leader, spend most of your time repeating key messages and sharing context that teams might be missing from higher-level meetings. This ensures everyone is aligned and can make better decisions.
17. Team Strategy & Roadmap Contract
Establish a clear contract with teams based on their strategy and roadmap, outlining goals, hypotheses, unique positioning, metrics, initiatives, risks, and long-term outcomes. This alignment empowers teams to execute autonomously.
18. Weekly Team Goal Sharing
Have all direct reports post their goals every Monday morning, encouraging them to review each other’s goals. This fosters transparency, alignment, and mutual accountability within the team.
19. One-on-One Focus
During one-on-one meetings, focus solely on what the team member needs from you, rather than reviewing their progress or tasks. This makes the meetings more efficient and directly supportive.
20. Bi-Weekly Team Context Meeting
Conduct a bi-weekly team-wide meeting to share missing context from leadership forums and deep-dive into the most important topics of the day. This keeps the entire team informed and aligned.
21. Structured Product Reviews
Implement a product review process for all large roadmap ‘rocks,’ involving the head of product and design. Teams must structure their presentations by asking for specific feedback and highlighting key risks and trade-offs.
22. Quality Control Mechanisms
Establish control mechanisms to ensure high velocity doesn’t compromise quality, such as sharing every negative customer review with the tech lead, PM, and designer monthly. Track NPS, CSAT, and operational overhead (tickets per user) as core team contracts.
23. Fix Bugs Immediately
Avoid a bug backlog by making it part of the production engineer’s job to fix every bug as soon as it’s surfaced. This leverages velocity to quickly resolve issues and maintain product quality.
24. Address User Confusion
Track support tickets caused by customer confusion, and if the number is elevated, halt the shipment of new features until these issues are fixed. This ensures a focus on user experience and clarity.
25. Leader Recognition & Motivation
Actively engage by commenting ’this is awesome’ on project channels or design crits, and provide engineers opportunities to present to leaders or at all-hands meetings. This amplifies culture and motivates teams.
26. Velocity as Burnout Prevention
View velocity as a way to avoid burnout by helping people get into a flow state and focus on building great products. When work feels thrilling and impactful, it’s less likely to lead to exhaustion.
27. Bianual, Lightweight Planning
Shift from expensive, time-consuming quarterly planning to a biannual one-pager outlining company priorities. This makes the planning process smoother, faster, and less political.
28. Focus on ‘Right to Win’
When expanding into new areas, focus on where your company is uniquely positioned to win by leveraging existing components, expertise, and integrations. This increases velocity and likelihood of success.
29. Incentivize Support to Reduce Tickets
Instead of solely focusing on resolving tickets, incentivize support staff to decrease the overall number of tickets and increase deflection. This shifts focus to proactive problem-solving and product improvement.
30. Block Time for Deep Work
Proactively block out time in your calendar for deep work, especially during less busy periods like early mornings, late afternoons, or one day on the weekend. This protects focused thinking time from distractions.
31. Robust, Simple Task Management
At the end of every meeting, clearly write down all owed tasks (yours and others’), including deadlines. Daily, groom these tasks into logical chunks (tactical vs. strategic, important vs. less important), and use reminders for others’ tasks.
32. Free Up Headspace
Create systems that free up your mental headspace for processing, not memory, by writing everything down. This allows for quick retrieval of information and reduces cognitive load.
33. Distribute PM Job
Reduce the size of the PM team to force designers and engineers to think like PMs, empowering them to take ownership of specs, priorities, scopes, and deep problem-solving. This leverages the entire R&D team.
34. Invest in Product Operations
Establish a Product Operations team to handle operational functions like project, issue, release, and enablement management, as well as customer research. This offloads low-leverage work from PMs, allowing them to focus on strategy.
35. Cut Low-Leverage PM Work
Eliminate low-leverage tasks for PMs, such as writing detailed tickets or spending excessive time in ticket management systems. Instead, provide high-level vision and priorities, pushing the breakdown of work to engineering teams.
36. Core PM Responsibilities
PMs should focus on team building within their pods, ensuring the team’s focus areas are humming, protecting the team from stakeholder chaos, and acting as the central point of contact for external questions.
37. Value Engineers’ Strong Opinions
Embrace a culture where engineers and designers challenge thinking and have strong opinions, even if it makes management harder. This leads to deeper consideration of requests and faster growth for managers.
38. Hiring for Impact & Thinking
When hiring, prioritize candidates with a strong desire for impact and the ability to think deeply, assessing past impact and decision-making processes. This is often more valuable than specific past experience.
39. Breaking into PM
For aspiring PMs, seek adjacent roles like Product Operations, Business Operations, Sales Engineering, or Solution Engineering to gain customer and product understanding. These roles provide experiences to prove oneself.
40. PM Candidate Trial
Offer PM candidates a 6-month trial in a new area, then allow the engineers and designers they work with to make the final hiring decision. This ensures team fit and practical performance assessment.
41. Turn Off Notifications
To protect deep work time, turn off notifications, quit Slack, and check emails only once a day for five minutes. Utilize Slack snooze and reminders for better focus and communication management.
42. Master Your Tools
Train yourself and your teams to be highly proficient and ‘dogmatic’ in using essential tools like calendars, Slack, and email. Efficient tool usage is crucial for productivity and operational efficiency.
43. Visionary Prototypes
Encourage designers to create visionary, interactive prototypes and share them via video. This provides immense clarity, excites the team, and unlocks velocity by giving a clear picture of the future product.
6 Key Quotes
Velocity is everything at RAMP. It's how we design our product development process. It's how we incentivize teams. It's who we want to hire. It's who we want to promote. And it's everything around how we make decisions and how we organize the organization.
Geoff Charles
Any second you spend planning is a second you don't spend doing.
Geoff Charles
Every support ticket is a failure of our product.
Geoff Charles
You can't ask for velocity and not have empowerment and not trust and not eliminate process and not increase the focus.
Geoff Charles
If you're able to write things clearly, you're able to think through things clearly.
Geoff Charles
I think that the high level theme is I try to create or free up headspace for processing not memory.
Geoff Charles
4 Protocols
Ramp's Recipe for High Velocity
Geoff Charles- Form small teams with a single-threaded focus.
- Provide teams with the necessary resources to execute.
- Set big, lofty goals with very tight timelines.
- Shield teams from the chaos of the rest of the organization.
- Avoid bothering teams or telling the rest of the company about new initiatives until they find product-market fit or early traction.
- Bring in more resources only after early traction is found.
Product Team Quality Control Mechanisms
Geoff Charles- Share every single negative product review back to the tech lead, PM, and designer on a monthly basis.
- Report NPS and CSAT scores regularly.
- Report operational overhead (percentage of tickets from a product area, normalized by user count) as a core contract for teams to maintain or lower.
- Directly assign bugs and issues to the engineer on call to ensure immediate pain and resolution.
Ramp's Strategy Document Structure
Geoff Charles- Align on the goals: What do you want to see in the world?
- State the hypothesis: Why do you think this will work?
- Identify unique positioning: Why are we uniquely positioned as a company to achieve that goal?
- Define metrics: How will you measure whether we reach that goal?
- Outline initiatives: What actions will be taken?
- Address risks: What potential challenges exist?
- Consider long-term outcomes: What are the expected results over time?
Geoff Charles's Task Management Process
Geoff Charles- At the end of every meeting, write down all tasks owed by yourself and by others, clearly stating what needs to be done and by when.
- At the end of the day, review all recorded tasks (using notes or a similar system).
- Group tasks into logical chunks (e.g., tactical vs. strategic, important vs. less important).
- For tasks owed by others, slack them the details and set a reminder on Slack for the due date to keep it out of your mind.
- The next day, create your calendar aligned with the goals set the day before, grouping tactical tasks and blocking out time for strategic deep thinking.