Our November NY Enterprise Tech Meetup (#NYETM) took a behind-the-scenes, real talk look at how Ramp and Figma have become such product powerhouse, generational companies. We got deep into the tactics of how to push your product to the next level with velocity, collaboration, and experimentation, with our panel featuring:
- Geoff Charles, VP of Product at Ramp who played a pivotal role in the development and release of 60+ products and features in 2023 alone - check out his Twitter for some of the best pro tips on product management.
- Mihika Kapoor, Product Lead at Figma who was recently voted the #1 PM to work with by Lenny Rachitsky’s product community and is known as Figma’s go-to person leading 0-to-1 products as the brains behind some of the most-used tools in the design world, including FigJam and Figma Slides.
Check out our tactical recap below and the full recording here.
The Quick Story
Ramp’s product velocity has been incredible.
The finance automation company, first launched in 2020, quickly surpassed $100M in ARR and achieved a $1B valuation within two years, becoming “the fastest-growing startup ever to come out of NYC.”
Geoff joined Ramp pre-product market fit with a team of only 10 people (8 of whom were engineers) in 2016 as the first Product Manager. Initially, Ramp focused on a corporate card product, which gained some traction, but struggled due to integration issues with existing expense management tools. At that time:
“We didn’t know how to grow. We didn’t know who we were targeting. We were just testing a lot of different things and seeing what worked.” – Geoff
This challenge led to a major pivot: Ramp decided to expand its offerings and build its own expense management system. Though this shift temporarily made sales harder and resulted in missed deals, within a year, Ramp took off.
Figma is often referred to as the “10 year overnight success,” now with over 4 million users. The design platform redefined how design teams worked – making it faster and collaborative.
The original pitch: “Figma was to take things from imagination to reality.” But after some investor confusion of what that broad mission meant, they narrowed it down to what it is today: “make design accessible to all.”
Figma is actually a very technical product under the hood. It might feel very seamless and beautiful in its UI, but it's similar to a gaming engine thanks to its multiplayer and real-time collaboration abilities.
Mihika joined Figma 10 years in, becoming the go to Product Manager for taking projects off the ground from 0 to 1. She was instrumental in launching new products like FigJam and Figma Slides, taking Figma’s offering beyond its core offerings.
Velocity Is Everything
“You need to set the train tracks, if you’re going to move a very fast train. The operational cadence is everything. We have this philosophy at Ramp, which is like, ‘the train is moving…you're either waving it on or you're on the train. But you're not on the train tracks.’” - Geoff Charles
6 Hot Takes To Achieve Product Velocity
- Focus on short-term 6-month roadmaps, not long-term planning. Focus on short-term, actionable roadmaps (e.g., 6 months) rather than long-term planning. While you’ll need a grand vision for how your company will change the world, how you will fulfill this vision will drastically change and morph over time. Why? 1) The market is rapidly and unpredictably shifting, making it impossible to predict what it will look like in two to five years, 2) as teams build, they learn and come up with new solutions/ideas, and 3) it’s more efficient to spend time building vs. planning, which tends to run in circles and fails to get things off the ground in a speedy way.
- Prioritize customer feedback over data. In B2B, it's crucial to talk directly to customers to validate if a solution is working, rather than over-relying on data. Data is often way too lagging and vanity metrics can often be misleading. It’s helpful to spend dedicated time with customers and sales reps (in their weekly deal reviews, attending pitches, etc.). This will help you as a product person understand the personas, the segments, the pain points, the systems, and figuring out where to place the product bet.
- Don’t spend hours crafting the perfect strategy document…no one will read it. Instead focus on how you can visually present your idea – a mock up / demo / etc. goes a much longer way.
- Build faster than your competitors. While "feature factories" sometimes get a bad reputation, being responsive to customer requests can be a highly effective way to meet their needs and secure deals. However, it’s crucial to build with impact in mind, maintaining a clear vision for how these features will drive meaningful change. Geoff shared a powerful example of taking a customer call one night and delivering a new feature by the next morning—a pace that truly differentiates you from sleepy incumbents.
- Push through the “nos.” Mihika’s tenacity in making Figma Slides a reality, despite countless “no’s” from the founders, was a great lesson on the lengths needed to justify a product into existence. It was the first product not driven by top-down leadership directives. The key challenges were: 1) getting others to buy into the idea, and 2) maintaining morale when the initiative isn’t seen as a top priority at the company level. To address the first challenge, you need to figure out how to make the idea "go viral" within the company—essentially, make it bigger than yourself—and demonstrate the existing customer pain with strong proof points. For the second, it’s crucial to have unwavering conviction in what you’re building. While many will tell you that aligning with your manager's priorities is the fastest route to promotion, focusing on what you truly believe in should always come first. In the end, it will be more rewarding.
- Treat product managers as culture carriers. Mihika started some great traditions at Figma with the underlying goal of understanding what motivates teammates. Here are a two examples:
1. Maker Week: This biannual, company-wide hackathon is open to everyone, not just engineers. For one week, all teams hit pause on their usual tasks to create—whether it’s features, products, murals, or art. I’ve had the opportunity to host it, and I personally use Maker Week to pitch my own ideas that may not yet be on the roadmap. It’s a time for bold ideas and creative energy, and it’s where initiatives like Figma Slides were born during October '22 Maker Week.
2. Hot Seat / Figgy’s: Celebrating your team is vital yet often overlooked. The more you create shared “memes” or rituals within the team, the closer everyone feels, the better they collaborate, and the more motivated they are. Finding ways to recognize each other can make a huge difference in team energy and cohesion.
If you’re an early-stage enterprise founder or operator — connect with us directly to chat about anything GTM or check out our events page to stay in the loop on all things happening in the Work-Bench community.
