Geoff Charles: evaluation

Transcript context

…With 50 people, which is incredible. And so just on that point, how do you do so much with so few PMs, especially? Do you have anything that you figured out that ends up being really important there? I think that by eliminating or reducing the size of the team, we've forced other people in the company to think like PMs and I think it's been a huge value add to our culture. When I say product, often people think about product management, but I actually think product is anyone that actually reports into our CTO, and that's product engineering, product design, product managers, product data scientists. So 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 in terms of a spec or direction and actually think through it deeply and come back with some great questions that the PM hasn't thought through. So that's one thing. The second is that we invested early on in product operations, which was a team that also reports to me that basically focuses on the operational functions of product that's everything around whether it's project management or issue management or release management or enablement and content beta and customer research. They basically are tasked with a lot of the work that needs to get done to continue shipping products and scaling product development. And then lastly, just cutting as much of the low-leverage work that PMs often get sucked into. So, for example, we never write a ticket. We don't spend much time in linear, which is our ticket management system. Basically, our contract is the vision and the priority and a very high-level spec and everything else is pushed on the engineering teams. And I think that's when engineers actually are also able to move even faster because they can create whatever tickets they want, they can break down the work that they want, they are accountable for the projects that they're driving, and that increases trust and moves things faster as well. That makes a ton of sense. Basically, you distribute the PM job that other companies put on the PM across other team members. So if you had to think about just what is the core product manager job at Ramp at this point, I imagine from what I've been hearing, it's strategy, vision, aligning the team. What else plays into that, just bullet point wise? A few things that come to mind.…

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