Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. I would say when new joiners come at Ramp, I intro myself and I talk about our product strategy. And in the meeting with an apology, I say, "You signed an implicit contract joining Ramp. It's one where we prioritize velocity over almost everything else. What that means is it'll be somewhat chaotic. We'll ship things that don't work. We will change our products without necessarily fully enabling you and you'll have to constantly be on your toes whenever you load up a demo instance." And I think that it's an expectation and people are welcoming of that because they understand that the tradeoff is that we don't move forward, that we don't actually innovate, that we don't continue to provide value for our customers. I think there's certain things that we plan for. And so the question really is 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. And so those things for us are large market moments where we have products, marketing, and sales all coordinating these big moments. And those typically happen maybe once a quarter, once every six months. It's basically your marketing calendar. We need a plan for that, for sure, but it's oftentimes a low percentage of our total R&D focus. And so it's totally fine for each team to be somewhat autonomous, somewhat chaotic within their pod. They're extremely clear, but for the outside in, it might be very chaotic. But be very accurate on the things that truly, truly matter. The rest actually doesn't matter. You don't need a lot of accuracy and confidence on when specifically certain features will be live. It's much better to spend whatever time you would spend trying to create accuracy and creating velocity. I love that you set expectations very clearly upfront. That seems really important to be successful at a company like that. It also just makes me remember every successful startup is extremely chaotic. As much as it may not feel like that on the outside, it's insanely chaotic. Things are constantly changing. I was at a fireside chat with Sheryl Sandberg once at Airbnb and somebody asked her just like, "How do you deal with change? Things are just ... We're reorging every six months. People are leaving and coming and teams are shifting and priorities are always adjusting." And she's just like, "This is the problem you want, you want to be going through this because that means you're growing and you're going through hypergrowth because the alternative is much worse where you're not growing and that's much more painful. " So I think it's just a good reminder that if you're working at a place that's chaotic, it's often a good thing. I would say so. I mean, oftentimes, people use that excuse to not have a very strong strategy. And I think that for us, we've always been, from the start, the spend management platform that helps you spend less. Our strategy ... I share an annual newsletter around what we did and what we're going to do next year. And it's oftentimes pretty spot on in terms of the goals. Again, the goals and the value and the problem and the vision, that's consistent. The specifics, the timing, the quarterly scopes, all these things, yes, it changes, but what you want to avoid is the thrash of people waking up and feeling like they're working at a different company or that leaders are constantly changing their minds. We've been extremely consistent from the start and I think most of the products that we build, most of the code that we written, is in the customer's hands and hasn't been ripped away. And I think that speaks a lot to velocity, too.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.