The Ledger, every show

“And like Amex is like, it does not know how to build software. It is an incredible company with an incredible brand and an incredible card and merchant product. But they're a far cry away from being a SaaS company.”

“I listened to that and I love that. I don't agree. And again, this is the Shopify, you know, obviously, you know, Toby's like very involved in the product surface area at ramp. I think we have Slightly different approach. I think that the, our founder Eric is …”

“Don't hire executives that will then hire people under them, because that obfuscates a lot of their performance, and so be clear to the leaders that you're hiring, like, you're not gonna have headcount for at least, like, six months. You're gonna have to do th…”

“I think the category Is not that relevant. You know, I come from more consumer than B to B. And I think that's actually an advantage because you're focusing on metrics. You're focusing on conversion. You're focusing on models like lead scoring and lead routing…”

“If you have a core team that's ambitious and you have one person in the team that's not as ambitious as that team, you need to part ways with that person. Because it briefly lowers the bar and everyone becomes demotivated.”

“Whether it's like Facebook trying to enter the B to B space, whether it's Stripe trying to actually go from like developers and SME to finance teams in, in, in the enterprise. It's hard. And we actually haven't seen that much success.”

“So a hundred percent, I think the software is going to look a lot less like tables, graphs, and dropdowns, and a lot more like a conversation Where I release a UI that is extremely dynamic, that abstracts the data that you actually would need to see, and just …”

“In three months, we built a competitor to Amex. Six months after that, we built a competitor to expensify, you know, both publicly traded companies.”

“Small teams have a single threaded focus give them the resources they need to execute, big lofty goals, very tight timelines, and then like shield them from the chaos that is the rest of the organization. Basically don't bother them and don't even tell the res…”

“It's the difference between a beta and the GA that that's where we really get plugged 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 a…”

“Behind ramps velocity is a lot less like the culture that, that I try to amplify a lot more, the quality of the engineering and design talent candidly.”

“Because accuracy has cost, make sure that you're only increasing the accuracy of planning for the things that have high value of that accuracy.”

“We moved from like quarterly, very expensive quarterly planning, which took one month every three months. So basically, 33% of the time was planning to a biannual one pager on these are the company priorities. And it's much more smooth and much faster.”

“I stay away from them from a product perspective, because again, I want to focus on velocity, which is just output, which is your roadmap. But they could, they're pretty strong at more of the cross-functional side of things as well as the financial side of thi…”

“Our support reports into me, and the first principle there was saying, well, every support ticket is a failure of our product. We literally have that as, you know, a quote just posted on, on, on all those channels. It's a failure. And our, if the product works…”

“Making everyone feel like a PM is a great way to get leverage as a PM. And that means basically empowering the designer to think about the actual specs and priorities and scopes more than you or empower the engineer to take something that's. Fairly lightweight…”

“We never write a ticket. We don't spend much time in, in, you know, linear, which is our ticket management system. We basically, our contract is the vision and the priority and a very high level spec and everything else is kind of Pushed on the engineering tea…”

“I mean, early, early on for the first year at ramp, Kareem our CTO was only focused on that. It was hiring the best talent. He was a lot less interested or focused on our product strategy or product market fit, or even our revenue. It was all about bringing in…”

“The founder or the first product manager should be selling the first hundred customers.”

“Products should sit with sales and should be in every single sales demo and use the sales process as a way to identify pain points.”

“You actually should be like a bit more professional services oriented as a product team earlier on.”

“If you actually find one or two design partners and you just build for them, they will love you way more than the best in class SaaS product that's already in the market.”

“Be super clear on the strategy, hire and hire more more IC level people who can show you the right path and test whether that strategy is the right strategy for you.”

“There are no other meetings that are recurring. In the entire product development process. Those are the only two one hour meetings that happen.”

“So I think that for the majority of the company, You need to be like single product oriented for a very long time until you get to the really good market share. But as a tech team, you actually need to have an R and D department that is constantly shipping new…”

“The reason why I don't like The framework is that it doesn't actually talk about strategy. It just gives a goal and then it just tells the team like, go hit this goal, but there's no thinking on the exec level about like how we can actually achieve that goal a…”

“The question really is around metric setting is like, can I As a team, in a two-week sprint, move this metric. And if I can, it's a great metric. If I can't, It shouldn't be part of really our goals.”

“I think oftentimes PM are enamored with their solution and they're not actually good at defining the hypothesis that led them to that solution. And they just ship this product and the product doesn't work. And then they have to go back and say, like, why didn'…”

“Oftentimes trust is eroded if you don't actually meet in person.”

“We invest in new players. We acquire you know, aqua hire great talent. And we actually use that as a testing bed to figure out, like, what's working, and we include that in our product strategy.”

“I would much rather have a lot of features that we can turn on and off based on the segment and based on the needs and continue testing rather than deprecating.”

“I've oftentimes you have PMs from, you know, the Facebooks and Googles of the world that are actually just good at testing. And moving metrics, but their intuition oftentimes isn't actually locked into customer research and actual customers.”

“Be a super micromanager the first month and then signpost that with your hire and then step off and step out and be very clear on the outcomes you're trying to drive.”

“I mean, we were one of the fastest growing fintech and maybe SAS companies of all time. I think we've hit a hundred million in annual for first two years.”

“We basically gave a team, you know, goal of building a competitor to build.com. It was three engineers, one designer, one PM, three months, and they hit it out of the park and that product is, is, is moving in billions of dollars a year.”

“We don't have a bug backlog. We fix every bug once they're surfaced almost.”

“And if that number is a 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 o…”

“And so I actually think velocity is a way to potentially avoid burnout. I'm not asking people to work, you know, unless hours a week, I'm asking people to get out of their own way and to focus on, on what truly matters, which is building great products for our…”

“Your job is to make sure that they're aligned with the long-term vision and that they can deliver what they've committed to. But on top of that, they can do whatever the hell they want. And if they're taking on something that puts the things that they committe…”

“And look like there, there's drawbacks to that culture, right? Where you get to like a radically empowered engineering team that thinks that they know the product better than the designer or the PM and they push back on the designs or they disagree with the PM…”

“Turn off notifications. Quit Slack. When you're doing deep work, check your emails once a day and just like literally go through them in like five minutes. They're off the times. Most of them are useless. Check Slack only at the top of the hour.”

“Oftentimes like product managers, they have an idea and they ask the question to validate their idea and it's actually the wrong idea.”

“Oftentimes just PM spend way too much time In the office, and I think that that's just a huge downside for your team.”

“The biggest mistakes were probably on, on on, on go to market earlier on, you know, we hired people who had seen success in growth.”

“For ICPMs on my team, I basically place them in teams that are high performing. And I, and we immediately see whether they are, they're at the bar. So, so you take basically something that is fixed, you add a variable and you, and if anything changes, right, i…”

“I think within three months, you should actually be able to say and figure out, like, is this person gonna hit it out of the park, or is this person not gonna work out?”

“We were extremely aggressive in terms of making it super easy for them to switch. And what I meant by that is like, we literally had teams say, give me your old credit cards. I will log in to all of your other software and I will switch your cards for you. I w…”

“So don't assign, but have people sign up.”