Geoff Charles: belief

Transcript context

…That touches on a phrase that's come up a couple times on this podcast that a leader's job, you're essentially the repeater in chief, reminding people of strategy, vision, things like that. It feels like to move fast, you need to do what you're talking about, which is empower your teams to just move, otherwise, it's not scalable. And I'm curious just to make it even more real. Either ... Is there an version of something you did at your previous work versus at Ramp that just shows what that looks like when you're empowering your team and not in the weeds? What's most different there? Is it the product reviews, you're not as involved in design iterations? Where do you come in to actually give feedback? How does that actually look like working at a Ramp versus another company? 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 the 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 use 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 as, I suppose, good more senior, they're basically publishing out the API by which they interact with me and we basically align 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 on 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 biweekly 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. What about the product experience itself? Is there design review that happens? How do you stay on top of just like, "I'm proud of this product that we're shipping as a team?"…

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