Ramp considers support tickets product failures and has support report to product
Geoff Charles · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup ever | Geoff Charles · Aug 6, 2023 · at 47:00
Geoff Charles is VP of Product at Ramp. He discusses Ramp's organizational structure and philosophy around customer support.
0:00 / 0:26exact quote · 26.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 perfectly, no one should ever have to contact our support team. And what better way of holding the product team accountable for support other than having support report into product.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Geoff Charles
Ramp built competitors to American Express and Expensify in months
“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.”
Shield new product teams from organizational chaos until product-market fit
“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…”
Fast-moving teams should stress-test product decisions at GA, not pre-beta
“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…”
Ramp's velocity is driven primarily by elite engineering and design talent
“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.”
Teams should only invest in planning accuracy where precision delivers high value
“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.”
Ramp replaced quarterly OKRs with a biannual one-pager of company priorities
“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.”