Geoff Charles
Geoff Charles is VP of Product at Ramp—the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time, Fast Company’s #1 Most Innovative Company in North America, and a company I believe we should all study for how they operate, execute, and hire. At Ramp, Geoff has led the product team from the early days, including the development and release of 60+ products and features in the past year alone. He has been building financial services for over a decade, and his interview in Lenny’s Newsletter quickly became one of the most widely read newsletter issues of all time.
Communication Skills
Use writing as a tool for first-principles thinking and problem crystallization rather than just documentation.
"The best way of doing that is to shut down your laptop, take out a piece of paper, write the question as simply as possible at the top of the paper, and just spend time just thinking about how to answ..."
Effective alignment happens by debating goals, hypotheses, and data interpretation rather than specific solutions.
"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."
Eliminate status meetings entirely to maximize execution time, moving all updates to asynchronous channels.
"The second thing that I would say is 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."
Design Skills
Structure design reviews around specific feedback requests and the explicit highlighting of risks and tradeoffs.
"I think we're relating now is any large rock that we have on the roadmap needs to be brought into the product review process, where myself and the head of design are present and giving feedback, but i..."
Engineering Skills
Maintain high product quality and velocity by addressing bugs immediately rather than allowing them to accumulate in a backlog.
"We don't have a bug backlog. We fix every bug once they're surfaced almost."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Prioritize a candidate's hunger for impact and depth of thought over specific domain experience.
"We look for people who have a very strong desire to have impact... I look for people who can think deeply, so I'll go super deep into a decision, a tradeoff that they had to make."
PMs are responsible for fostering a cohesive culture within cross-functional pods, regardless of reporting lines.
"Building a culture within the pod because oftentimes your managers are no longer in your team... PMs might report to different people. So actually building a team culture within the pod is really, rea..."
Leadership Skills
Presenting clear 'either/or' choices to leadership helps maintain focus and prevents the 'do everything' trap.
"Be very clear with the tradeoffs that you need to make and present those tradeoffs back to your leadership team. So here's what we're doing and here's what we're not doing and why and which one would..."
Product Management Skills
A strong strategy identifies the company's 'right to win' by leveraging unique internal advantages.
"Strategy is about how do we get to our goals? And it's not a roadmap and it's not a vision, it's something right in between that... Figure out why we're uniquely positioned as a company to get after t..."
Reduce planning overhead by moving from rigid quarterly OKRs to high-level biannual priority documents.
"We moved from quarterly, very expensive quarterly planning, which took one month every three months, so basically 33% of the time was planning, to a biannual one-pager on, these are the company priori..."
Treat every customer support interaction as a signal of product friction that should be engineered away.
"The first principle there was saying, 'Well, every support ticket is a failure of our product.' We literally have that as a quote just posted on all those channels. It's a failure."
High-velocity shipping is achieved by isolating small, focused teams from organizational distractions and giving them aggressive timelines.
"I think the recipe for all this is constantly small teams have a single-threaded focus, give them the resources they need to execute big lofty goals, very tight timelines, and then shield them from th..."
The guest highlights Product Ops as a critical function for scaling a high-velocity team by handling release management, enablement, and operational tasks that usually distract PMs.
"We invested early on in product operations... they basically are tasked with a lot of the work that needs to get done to continue shipping products and scaling product development."