Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup ever

Any second you spend planning is a second you don't spend doing. The biggest waste of time is meetings and status updates. I've never had a status meeting. I've never scheduled a status meeting. Statuses are done async.

I think the biggest waste of time is meetings and status updates. And I think that oftentimes CEOs would say, or leaders would say, 'Hey, we've got increased velocity, therefore let's just add these status meetings and let's add all this process.'

Single threaded is there's only one goal, one thread, that they're waking up in the morning to focus on. And in order to remove that, you basically need to remove anything else that they're being asked to do to just focus on that thing.

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.

The best way to increase your capacity to think is to actually do the thinking. And so that's where I see writing. If you're able to write things clearly, you're able to think through things clearly.

Velocity is everything at Ramp. It's how we design our product development process. It's how we incentivize teams, it's who we want to hire, it's who we want to promote, and it's everything around how we make decisions and how we organize the organization.

You can't ask for velocity and not have empowerment and not trust and not eliminate process and not increase the focus. And that requires some serious tradeoffs that oftentimes leaders, especially those coming from more traditional industries, are not comfortable with.

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.

We don't have a bug backlog. We fix every bug once they're surfaced almost. So it's part of the production engineer's job really just to fix those things.

OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results, a goal-setting framework where teams define objectives and measure progress through specific key results.

I largely stay away from OKRs from a product perspective. I want to focus on velocity, which is just output, which is your roadmap, but they're pretty strong at more of the cross-functional side of things.

I ask, what's the hardest thing you've ever done? And I ask that because working at Ramp is hard. I want to understand what hard means for them.