How Ramp Raised $800m in 18 Months

founders what's going on you guys know i love in-person events and they are back the recording you're about to hear is from our most recent event where we had hundreds of founders come together share intimate details templates kpis okrs about their business and it was something special something special we'd love to meet you in person if you want to see the next live events we have coming up via our schedule the link will be down below in the description if you're listening on itunes check this out on youtube you'll see the links in the description or you can just google

founder path or latka next event we'd love to see you in person in the meantime though enjoy this recording it's a good one he's gonna teach you a ton welcome jeff frost up to the stage [Applause] hello hello founders who's the founder here i am not a founder

i'm the guy the founders bring in to turn their vision into reality that's what product people do who's a product person here who's the product team i'll give you guys in 20 minutes everything that i've learned over the last 10 years in product development and there's a lot of finance speak here a lot of balance sheets a lot of income statements i don't care about any of that what i care about is building a product that people want and build it in the fastest way possible when the marathon sprint by

sprint this is a value at ramp and what it means is building a company is a marathon takes a long time it's grueling and the way to break it down is by sprint the next mile the next minute and keep that pace up and a great inspiration for me is elliot kipchoge in a misty morning in vienna in october 2020 kipchoge unofficially broke the world record

of the marathon in an hour and 59 minutes incredible and there's a lot to learn in marathon running that i'll apply to this talk today a little bit about ramp i joined ramp january 2020 at that point we had 100 customers 50 employees and a barely a product it was a corporate card and when you swiped it and you texted a receipt it automatically matched your receipt to that transaction and synced it over to

your accounting system and over the last two years we went from 100 employees to 300 from 100 customers to 5 000 and from one product to five and what's most impressive with this isn't the dollars we raised it's not the number of employees we have it's the fact that we did this with 35 engineers on average and we did that through high speed development velocity so

how do you develop products quickly three main things that i want to drive today the first is empowerment empowered teams the second is feedback and the third is a fast cadence let's talk about empowerment don't make excuses when you have decided to do something do it no excuses keep choking i want to emphasize something here which

is really important it's the word you you means that you have decided to do something and what empowerment means is not telling someone what to do but making that person believe that they have made that choice that it's their idea the way to empower product teams is as founders to start with a vision right this is why you started your company you have a perceived vision of where you

want to be the world you want to live in to reach that vision you define goals these are the things that you want to hit the milestones you define to figure out if you hit those goals you define metrics kpis revenue growth customers csat retention and to hit these metrics you have different hypotheses once you have these hypotheses you define projects these are the things the tasks that you need to do to hit these hypotheses and

once you've released these projects or features or products you get results the single biggest mistake that sas companies make is that they think that product management is at the project level and that is fundamentally wrong the moment you shift this perspective is the moment that your teams will move dramatically faster you assign teams goals

not projects you sign you give them the finish line 26.2 miles you don't tell them how to get there and you hold them accountable to those outcomes this shift of empowerment is fundamental in innovation it's fundamental in product like growth it's fundamental in any competitive market once you've empowered your teams you need to give them the resources they need to execute and so one of the biggest shifts that we've made is organizational

structures a classic mistake that companies make is they think about their teams in verticals of functionality you have the marketing team the engineering team the product team the partnerships team the legal team and they are all managed by different people with different incentives and different skill sets there's no way to make those teams talk to each other and so the way that you need to empower

teams is to create single threaded fully autonomous product led teams this takes courage it takes a lot of cultural shifts but once you make this shift these teams will be completely accountable to a single goal that you've set for them you have the product and engineering design teams which are the core center of development and they are fully supported by a ton of product minded teams

marketing brand operations data science analytics partnerships legal and they live day in and day out together in the same room in the same meetings in the same scrum mindset what do managers do what's management at this stage how do managers know what the hell is going on the reality is that managers stop being task managers and they become coaches

and that's another fundamental shift the tasks assigned to these teams are actually set by the teams themselves they define what they need to do and managers become coaches that coach the team that provide feedback that figure out the development process the career tracks as well as the resources that they need so here's an example of how we donate a ramp we have six single threaded teams we have a growth team they're accountable for revenue that growth team reports to me we have a spend management team we have a bill pay team

we've an accounting team and a risk and payments team and the way that we structure these is the team has a business objective they own the user experience they have clear systems they need to build and they have a roadmap now to make sure that there's not chaos that people are moving in different directions obviously all these road maps tie into a single product strategy i'll give an example travel a lot of our customers were like hey we're traveling again how can ramp help us manage

travel so the vision was help companies save time and money that's what ram does if you're on ramp you will save a lot of time and a lot of money you set up your goal our goal is to be the one stop shop for travel purchases we want to companies when they think about travel they go on ramp and we define the metric which is the percentage of travel spend that happens on ramp cards that's how we make money and the amount of time spent on expense reports which we hate

that's the line that's the line that's what we give the team we don't tell them what solution to build now you would think well let's just build a travel portal let's just build one of these clunky portals where you can just book your travel that'll be one solution but what empowered teams do is they talk to the customer deeply and they understand that it's not a travel portal what finance teams want is visibility and what they want is control you don't

need a travel portal for this what you actually need is data so we launch ram for travel and what it does is the moment you swipe your credit card we integrate with your gmail we integrate with lift we integrate with uber we treat a bunch of different travel portals and we automatically pull your itinerary and the moment that you submit that we automatically flag anything that's out of policy we also give companies full visibility on where everyone is traveling automatically

without a single expense report submitted and compare that to the old expense reports where you would travel spend on your card wait you know months get nagged by the finance team submit it and then finance teams like what the hell was this i closed my books three months ago you didn't tell me you were going to vegas and then from a results perspective 95 percent of travel spends on ram cards and 90 of expense reports are automated you wouldn't get that result with a

travel portal and you wouldn't get that with disempowered teams let's talk about feedback you cannot train a loan and expect a vasters time 100 of myself is nothing compared to one percent of the whole team it takes a village to build a product and it takes a city to ship a product launching products is easy right you build it

you release it you get some feedback pat yourself on the back but to truly launch a great product it's much much harder who here is in b2b all right you got your your marketing team your legion team your sales team your customer success team your support team your partnerships team they all have different goals different opinions everything starts slowing down you can't let it if there's discomfort that means you're

moving fast so we implemented just like a marathon or training program we implemented a track a machine mechanical way of releasing products quickly we have a tiering system that we align on tier one tier two tier three in terms of product releases we have a marketing team that grinds they're here today product hearing landing pages sales collateral press releases lifecycle marketing newsletters social media paid ads whatever they own all that and they constantly

are creating content so we have a product calendar synced to a marketing calendar sync to a sales calendar and that sales calendar is accountable for enablement training feedback and analytics in terms of our sales the faster this motion moves the faster the feedback comes back to the product team and what's really important is having equal empowerment and leadership across customer facing teams marketing

teams and product teams but feedback is chaotic right you get feedback from everyone everyone has an opinion you know support teams like yo everyone's complaining about this thing sales team is like this because this customer wants this big feature and it's a big whale account management team are like i'm going to lose my you know my spiff if we don't build this one little widget so the way that we did it

is we defined a lead in each customer facing team that were accountable for the voice of the customer on that specific product and they are tied and embedded in the single threaded product led team the voice of the customer really important and what's really important for the product management team is to be empowered to say no we got to say no right

it's more important what you say no to than what you say yes to is this the line with our vision right is this a target customer that we actually care about does this drive the goals that we set for it and is this real pain is this something that when we actually solve it the customer will be better off so we say no to a ton of things but what needs to happen is equal empathy

the product team needs to be in the shoes of the salesperson they need to be in the room with sales understanding that the customer needs this and the sales team needs to be in the room with the product team understanding what the hell they're doing right it's not like we're saying no because we're lazy we're saying no because we're working on 16 things that are more important like everything at ramp we bootstrap tech we've used a lot of partners a lot of vendors

and feedback can actually be automated we use typeform for surveys gong for sales calls zendesk for support pendo for in-app analytics and salesforce uh salesforce if anyone's building a salesforce competitor here please please come talk to me all that data is piped into our data warehouse and at any point in time i can pull a report that tells me every single thing that is blocked every single feature that is needed

how important that feature is and the correlation with those features to our target segments the correlation of those features to activation retention csat i can slice and dice the data in a million different ways the other thing that we use a lot is slack we have slack channels and what that does is every time there's a feedback or an input it's posted on slack it's crazy it's noisy but there's visibility and when you're a salesperson and you understand that there's 16 other things that customers want you understand how

hard it is to be on the product team so this is an example for example of a report what's required here is classification coding we code by product type we code by subproduct type we have a classification around like a nice to have a must-have or a blocker and then we cross-correlate so you can build essentially just a weighted average pipeline right on sales deals any specific features or problems high-velocity

operational cadence my favorite to win is not important to be successful is not even important how to plan and prepare is crucial who here has run a marathon ah all right you know that running the marathon is not that hard what's hard is getting up in the morning and training what's hard is sticking to your schedule what's hard is the routine the grind

right and with the right process you can remove a ton of that there's no decision that you have to make you're waking up you're going for a run you have to you just remove that decision-making process same thing is true for product development a couple operating principles learn build launch on learn ask why i'll get into that design thinking we use mock-ups figma build a whole product now one line of

code and pull the team early this is a classic one if you think about your devs as you know i.t in a cave they will not work hard or fast bring your engineers to the customer and they will they will light up and they will be empowered on the build smooth process i'll get into that work back from an mvp and small teams classic bezos two pizza

rule all right the moment you have like a bigger the team too big to eat two pizzas break them in half give them different goals on the launch side launch early this is a classic one right if you're not proud of what you're building or what you're launching you've launched too late track metrics i'll get into that a little bit and package releases what does packaging mean it means you can release on on an ongoing basis right we release 100 times a day but from a marketing perspective we package it

we package into large stepwise motions we package different features and repackage and repackage and repackage and go back to the press go back to the partners go back to our landing pages smooth process who here uses okrs all right it's not a bad one objectives and key results all right i talked a little bit about that define what you want to do

to find how you measure it we use okrs every quarter and we hold typically product managers accountable for the key result all right so there's an assigned key result owner it's not the initiative right the key result isn't build this widget is get to this goal right once you have your key result and your pm and your cross-functional team then think about all right what the hell are we going to do to get this goal

that's the brainstorming phase we have a bi-weekly sprint planning process what that means is every two weeks we pull up with the whole team and we talk about what do we do what impact do they have what are we going to do why is it important who's doing what it's extremely operational and it's extremely high leverage especially in a distributed environment where people have meetings one-on-ones all the time you cut all that one big meaning high velocity then we

have daily scrums scrum is you know what did you do yesterday what are you doing today what are you blocked on what do you need help on i'll get a little bit into that and then results constant monitoring with clear dashboards that are tied to the chaos and you keep going okay ours this is a screenshot of our first okrs back in 2020 um objective key result owner ideas

brainstorming feature which kr is it going to hit to what value is it going to have on the kr how much effort is it you can use a scoring mechanism i never really believe in scores at the end of the day but it's a nice idea project execution we use linear little plug-in for linear a great great little task management tool clear project

break it down assign it keep track of the burn down 100 of customers request or acknowledge within one hour this is our first support team right i was running support at the time i was answering answering tickets initiatives build an ivr hire and improve self-service functions those are our three initiatives to drive that care so yeah we don't have any project managers project managers are there because people don't know how

to do their own their own tasks empower teams are empowered and they're accountable so you break it down and when you're giving an update to the team and you're saying i didn't get this done the team will hold you accountable not the project manager and then key results also very outdated we um i can talk at length about this but a lot of this should be automated right segment for analytics amplitude or mixpanel or google

analytics for reporting and you review these every single day every single week every single month so that's the process um and it works i want to talk a little about more two more specific things around the process one is dual track delivery so what's important is when you decide to do something before you build anything

because building is very expensive spend a ton of time understanding what to build so we have two tracks happening in every single single threaded team one track is discovery it's the research it's the ideas it's the prototyping and one track is the execution you can get very far with a prototype and 10 customer calls on the ninth customer call they will tell you the same thing and that's when you know you've hit a good outcome once you've defined

so once you've defined a good idea then you bring into the delivery track and the delivery track is all about getting it out as quickly as possible once you separate those two tracks you clarify who's responsible for what and you clarify what stage a project is in and shoot down as many ideas as you can from the discovery track to the execution track the second thing is asking why if you build the wrong thing your

velocity is going to go down and the way to build right especially in b2b is to ask why the reason why financial products are terrible is because people who use financial products are terrible they're terrible at giving feedback hey mr accountant what what can we build for you i would love this button i would love this drop down i would love this process that slows

down my entire organization there's an account in here sorry ask why why do you want this button why do you want this drop down oh actually it's because like at the end of the month i i downloaded this sheet why do you do it on this why do you download this sheet well it's because i need to reconcile this with this system okay what is the system let me let me reconcile it for you right so build what they need not what they want and that requires guts it requires deeply understanding your customer it requires sitting down with

them and doing their job that's really really important that's what product is it's not you know taking requirements from a customer and just building a widget so death to concur the last thing is working backwards a lot of companies you know they use the term mvp oh let's just build this mvp i'll just ship this mvp um that's great

all right mvps are great but what's important is before you build this mvp know where you're going start with the 10x experience so you say okay what's better what's better than excuse being here okay what's better than that and what's better than that and what's better than that and once when you define the 10x experience then you walk backwards because then you're building towards something greater all right so let's take automating expense reports which we all

all hate expense reports all right what's a 2x experience well 2x experience says i text my receipt there's ocr and matches the receipt great or i take an uber and i don't have to file an expense report great all right what's a five times experience well the five time experience is i make a purchase on any any website and it automatically pulls my receipt and it parses my itinerary and i don't have to tell anyone if it was a coach class or which hotel i was at or whatever

okay what's a 10x experience 10x experience is i just swipe right and all the itemized receipts or all the itemization are coming from the visa network or the network itself and when i submit a receipt there's machine learning on the receipt that automatically flags my finance teams if you know i took something out of the minibar right that's 10x and spending time on the 10x is extremely motivating it's motivating to everyone and then when you

realize that you have a 10x idea they need to understand well i need to hire data scientists i need a partner with visa and you start building towards this future it might be horizon three right it'll take two years three years but the work that you're doing now can compound into that don't don't just ship an mvp and you know hope that you'll get the idea of what the next phase should be

so i shared a lot here around empowered teams and how to structure empowered teams i shared a lot about feedback and how to increase visibility and empathy across product and marketing teams i talked a lot about the operational process they need to put in place to speed up decision making and speed up development and learning the last the quote i want to leave you with is

when you smile and you're happy you can trigger the mind to not feel your legs i love this quote and it turns out that the fastest runners are those that love running and so for us right what the fastest teams aren't those that work harder are those that love what they do and believe in what they do

and so as founders the most important thing that you need to do with your teams is to make them believe is to make them happy is to make them passionate and once they are grinding isn't so bad that they are essentially working towards whatever finish line they define for themselves or whatever finish line you define for them that's it speed is everything

and thank you very much for your time

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