Geoff Charles: belief

Transcript context

…I know another important ingredient to how you all operate is you really like to empower product teams and give them a lot of control over how they operate and what they build and how they set goals and things like that versus micromanaging them. I think you have this concept of context over control. I'm curious how you actually operationalize that. A lot of people love the idea of empowering their teams and then they do that and then they do the wrong thing or they take too long or they set the wrong goals. So how do you actually make that work and create empowerment within your teams? Yeah, it was one of the biggest cultural differences, I think, in Ramp versus other companies that were as a part of where my boss, the CTO, Karim, was extremely hands-off in terms of the actual pride decisions because we were extremely aligned on the goals themselves. And so that's where you really just start alignment is, what is the goal that you're going after? What is the hypothesis that you have to reach that goal? What is the data by which you're coming up with that hypothesis? And then what is the potential solution to test that hypothesis? And oftentimes, more junior leaders, and I was certainly in that camp earlier on, kept focusing on the solutions and debating the right solution when in fact you should really be debating upstream of that. You should be debating the interpretation of data, you should be debating the hypotheses and the different ideas that you have there as to what's really going on or you should be debating the goals themselves. And so whenever things went wrong at Ramp, it was when I was being prescriptive with regards to the solution without actually explaining and aligning upstream on the goal, the hypothesis, and the data. And if you do that, you realize that the solutions actually can come much better from teams that are much closer to the ground. I think that's the biggest goal that I have now in my role is to continue giving context so that teams focus on the right goals, come up with the right hypotheses and focus on the right data points. And I spent most of my time just repeating myself, most of my time just sharing the context that I think they might be missing, especially given that I'm in certain meetings or certain groups in certain forms that they're not a part of and my responsibility to represent them and then share back the context for them to make better decisions over time. 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?…

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