Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product)

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.