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MacInnis: Rippling suffered two years of executive disarray from hiring mistakes

Matt McGinnis · “I deliberately understaff every project” | Leadership lessons from Rippling’s $16B journey · Dec 28, 2025 · at 19:01

Matt McGinnis, CPO and former COO at Rippling, explains the engineering and product executive hiring mistakes that led him to step in as CPO.

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“We had a hiring mistake in engineering leadership where the product leader at the time had to sort of run engineering. We subsequently had a mistake in in product hiring. And a lot of us had to sort of pitch in and Parker and I sort of stared at each other through two years of this kind of disarray or this chaos or this agony of, Things just never really having good executive leadership over both engineering and product at the same time.”

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