YouSaid · the spoken record

Geoff Charles

lines on the record: 75
first: 2023-08-06
most recent: 2023-08-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Meetings should be all about collaboration, ideation, decision making, et cetera. So just look at your calendar and just kill as many things as possible and kill just an important process. And the last thing that I would say is oftentimes, you know, leaders say, I want to move super, super fast, but they'll say I want everything under the sun. I want this and that and that. An example of that at RAMP is always like the debate between adding more products to one segment or going to a different segment SME versus a market resident enterprise. And you ask the CEO, hey, which one should we do? And they would say, all of it, because they think that the more goals you have, the faster you'll be able to execute. And I think there's just a limitation to that. So the thing I would amplify is be very clear with the trade-offs that you need to make and present those trade-offs back to your leadership team. So here's what we're doing and here's what we're not doing and why.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest waste of time is meetings and status updates. And I think that oftentimes CEOs would say or leaders would say, hey, we've got to increase velocity. Therefore, let's just add these status meetings and let's add all this process and all these documents and all these ways the whole team's accountable. And that's just a huge way to demotivate people. And so I've never had a status meeting. I've never scheduled a status meeting. Statuses are done async. They are done in the systems by which they operate, and largely they should be in real time.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the product that is built, and the engineers have a lot more say into it. And so it's something that I've seen done really, really well at RAMP where the CEO sets the vision, but is much less opinionated about the specific sequence by which we get there and trusts a tech organization that is ragnally empowered. The second thing that I would say is”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, one, I'm sorry. Look, it goes without saying, like PMs, we can't do anything by ourselves. We're very useless. We're a force multiplier. And so the one thing that I'll highlight is like behind ramps velocity is a lot less like the culture that I try to amplify, a lot more the quality of the engineering and design talent candidly. And so I'm just standing really on their shoulders here. And so advice number one is Ensure that from the top down, there's an investment in RD as a first class citizen that you're paying up market, that you're hiring the best, that you're focusing on your engineering and tech brand, that you're bringing people who want to work there because they want to be empowered. And then you have a culture of empowerment. And what that means is, and it's hard to get right. What that means is the CEO has less say.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Support tickets come in that were due to a customer being confused. So we track that. And if that number is slightly elevated, we're basically saying you can't ship any new features. You need to fix these things. And so, yeah, there's just these types of controls. But basically trying to standardize across the teams, this is your percentage of operational burden. This is your CSAT. This is your NPS. And this is the number of customers that are confused. As long as you maintain those metrics, you can do whatever you want. But the moment that these things are in the red, you can't ship new features and you need to revert back to the me.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't have a bug backlog. We fix every bug once they're surfaced. So it's part of the production engineer's job, really, just to fix those things. I think where we get to nuance is like user experience improvements. The metric there that I really look at is how many”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assigned to the engineer that's on call. So they feel that pain and then they can continue to your point leveraging velocity to solve those problems. Velocity is just a magnitude. It's not necessarily a specific direction.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you have to create a system by which those folks are getting that feedback, right? And so we really focused on what are the control mechanisms that ensure that your high velocity doesn't tank the business. And so examples of that is we have a voice of customer processes where every single negative review that is shared to our products is shared back to the tech lead, the PM and the designer on a monthly basis. We report back NPS and CSAT. We report back operational overhead, meaning the percentage of tickets that come from your product area normalized by the number of users that are using that product. And that's a core contract that the team has to maintain a low or lower part of operational burden. We also have bugs and issues being derived.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In when we make the decision to go live to the rest of the customer base and asking sales to start selling, that's where I'll really come in and stress test the hypotheses and the decisions. It's further downstream. So it's more risky. But because we move so fast, you don't waste that much time if you have to pull it back.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say we're iterating. I think when the first couple years it was more asynchronous and ad hoc process. And once you hit 10, 15 pms and 20 or 30 different mini pods shipping constantly, I think you need a bit more of a process by which you have high risk decisions that are being surfaced. We're iterating. I think what relating now is any large rock that we have on the roadmap needs to be brought into the product review process where myself and the head of design are present and giving feedback. But it needs to be structured in a way where you're asking specifically for what type of feedback you need and you're highlighting the key risks and trade-offs that you're making implicitly in that review. So that's one way we're able to scale. But I would say largely people ship and it's the difference between a beta and the GA that's where we really get plugged.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Line on what's most important on each one on one. So I basically have teams, all my directs post their goals every week, first thing Monday. The goal there is to also have them review each other's goals. I have a one-on-one template that I basically use to keep track of how progress is being made, but I certainly don't spend the time in the one-on-one going into that. I spend the one-on-one just focusing on what they need from me. And then on a bi-weekly basis, I have a team-wide meeting where I share context that everyone is missing. And we go deep on the most important topics of the day.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the contract between me and the team is really their strategy and their roadmap. And as long as we are aligned on this strategy and we can get into that and aligned on the roadmap and the timing, that's their contract. And so then at that point, my goal is to continue to give them context to execute on that and to coach them through that by getting firsthand data on how things are going that they might be missing. And their role is to highlight risks and highlight one way decisions that they need my input on. And again, it didn't used to start that way. I mean, when we first started, it was just me and another PM. I was fairly micromanaging in some areas. I think you build trust over time and you start having these contracts. And so I suppose Good More Senior, they're basically publishing out the API by which they interact with me. And we basically align.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so whenever things went wrong at ramp, it was when I was being prescriptive with regards to the solution without actually explaining and aligning upstream on the goal, the hypothesis, and the data. And if you do that, you realize that the solutions actually can come much better from teams that are much closer to the ground. I think that's the biggest goal that I have now in my role is to continue giving context so that teams focus on the right goals, come up with the right hypotheses and focus on the right data points. And I spent most of my time just repeating myself, most of my time just sharing the context that I think they might be missing, especially given that I'm in certain meetings or certain groups and certain forms that they're not a part of and my responsibilities to represent them and then share back the context for them to do better, make better decisions over time.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was one of the biggest cultural differences, I think, in ramp versus other companies that were as a part of where my boss, the CTO Kareem, was extremely hands-off in terms of the actual pride decisions because we were extremely aligned on the goals themselves. And so that's where you really just start alignment is what is the goal that you're going after? What is the hypothesis that you have to reach that goal? What is the data by which you're coming up with that hypothesis? And then what is the potential solution to test that hypothesis? And oftentimes, you know, more junior leaders, and I was certainly in that camp earlier on, kept focusing on the solutions and debating the right solution when in fact you should really be debating upstream of that. You should be debating the interpretation of data. You should be debating the hypotheses and the different ideas that you have there as to what's really going on, or you should be debating the goals.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Loom walkthroughs of Figma prototypes that design I spent a lot of time talking through. And I think that's a big part of the motivation. And so both of those things combine, I think, helps us stay motivated. I think there's a constant pushback to like, okay, what can we actually achieve? But you're able to move super, super fast if you have those two things in mind, the market and the revenue goal because we're very revenue driven as a company and the designs that can really keep you anchored on what this could look like.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first thing is we have market comparables, which is very exciting for us. So when you look at Bill.com, right, they're a publicly traded company, expensified publicly traded or concur or coupa. These are all like large players that are actually very motivating and largely de-risk some of the business decisions you're making. That's existing markets. We've also been able to create markets. Spend management was an actual market before we and other competitors kind of jumped into it. So that's motivating. Go attack that market and go drive that revenue is very motivating. We also use designs as a way to motivate teams. So we spend a lot of time with designers crafting out what the future of this thing could look like. And that's also extremely motivating. So we constantly go back to these cornerstone.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have, for example, on bugs or issues like that, we have individuals that are protecting those teams from those issues. So we have a rotational program on production engineering, for example, where engineers are protecting the core team from escalations from bugs, from issues. We have product operators that are protecting the PM from the chaos that is documentation and escalations and release management and enablement, customer requests. So we have layers of protective tissue to core teams. But I would say like for any of these big bets, you basically have to pull folks from different teams and reorganize a sub team. And that team typically doesn't have responsibility on any existing product because these are all fairly new products. I think it gets more challenging when you go from one to two rather than zero to one.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so for example, we launched a Flex product over the last summer. That was a single threaded team. We're just focused on e-commerce companies and their needs with more cash flow conversion and cash flow smoothing. And so we kept that team, again, just purely focus on just shipping that product and hitting that goal. If they were ever distracted by something else, I don't think we would have hit it.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are very few people who are able to execute extremely well more than one thing. And it's especially true for individual contributors. And so what I mean by single threaded is like there's only one goal, one threat that they're waking up in the morning to focus on. And in order to remove that, you basically need to remove anything else that they're being asked to do to just focus on that thing, whether it's any type of research or any type of production engineering or any type of process that's outside of that single goal. And it almost goes as far as like you just saving a room in the office just for them and they are just in that room all day, every day, just working on that one thing.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the rest of the organization? So basically, don't bother them and don't even tell the rest of the company that you're doing these things until they find product market fit, until they actually find that early traction. And then they can bring in more resources. So sort of like gravity, right? And gravitational pull do its thing.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when I joined, we were about 10-ish folks, about eight engineers. In three months, we built a competitor to Amex. Six months after that, we built a competitor to expensify both public and traded companies. We hit 100 million in yield revenue. I think we were under at that point 50 total in the R&D department less than 40 engine years in 3 p.m. And then we started expanding into accounts payable. We basically gave a team goal of building a competitor to build outcom. It was three engineers, one designer, 1 p.m., three months, and they hit it out of the park. And that product is moving in billions of dollars a year. And I think the recipe for all this is constantly small teams have single-threaded focus, give them the resources they need to execute, big lofty goals, very tight timelines, and then shield them from the chaos that”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So you mentioned it, you nailed it velocities 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. I think, you know, it came from the fact that during the pandemic, we started with a very small team and there was a huge market opportunity ahead of us. And it wasn't so much which path we wanted to pick, but rather how fast we were able to execute on that path. And so Velocity was kind of. Then you're able to essentially simplify a lot of decisions.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we were one of the fastest growing fintech and BB SaaS companies of all time. I think we've hit 100 million annual revenue for the first two years. And we've continued growing significantly since then. I think every day about 1,000 users join our platform. And this year, we've grown to hit 600 million in savings and 8.5 million an hour saved for our customers by controlling spend and automating a lot of the manual tasks. We'll continue to grow fast. And in terms of just raw transaction volume, we have crossed 10 billion in analyzed spending on the platform and just getting started.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Ramp is a finance automation platform and corporate cards solution for small and medium-sized businesses. So we help businesses essentially automate most things across expense management, card payments, bill payments, and accounting. And we've helped 15,000 of such businesses automate a lot of their back office to focus on what really matters, which is growing their company and providing value to their customers.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I joined, we were about 10-ish folks, about eight engineers, and in three months we built a competitor to Amex. Six months after that, we built a competitor to expensify both public and traded companies. We hit 100 million in yield revenue. I think we're under at that 50 total in the R&D department less than we're engineers and RPMs. And then we started expanding into accounts payable. It was three engineers, one designer, one PM, three months. And they hit it out of the park. And that product is moving in billions of dollars a year. And I think the recipe for all this is”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source