20VC: Ramp's Product Playbook: How To Hire Product Teams, How to Run Sprints, How to Increase Product Velocity, When and How to Go Multi-Product with Geoff Charles, VP Product @ Ramp

**Geoff Charles** (0:00)
Products should sit with sales and should be in every single sales demo. You actually should be like a bit more professional services oriented as a product team earlier on. The founder or the first product manager should be selling the first hundred customers. And so as you go multi-product, you just need to ask yourself, what can I reuse from the first product in terms of second product? The reality is it's very hard for large companies to actually innovate.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:22)
Welcome back to 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best product leaders to discuss how they start, scale and manage product teams. To date, we have one of the fastest growing companies product leaders joining us, Geoff Charles, VP of Product at Ramp. Geoff leads the product management operations and support teams at Ramp. And prior to Ramp, Geoff helped spin off Mission Lane and scale credit products to millions of customers. This is a super tactical episode. We get very granular. And so get the notebooks out and be prepped. You will want to take notes on this one. But before we dive into the episode's date, I'm refreshing the 20VC Miro board and I'd love your input again. It's really easy. Just head on over to miro.com forward slash 20VC and leave your guest suggestions for future shows. And you can do it with a digital sticky note or a comment. You can head over to miro.com forward slash 20VC. And Miro actually sponsored this episode. If you haven't already tried it, I think you'll love it. Miro is the online workspace for innovation. It's packed with the right capabilities to be your dream products home base that you can visualize content, data and research findings all in one space with no problem. It means this space is where you map customer journeys with the whole product team, create user behavior dashboards and map process diagrams. And finally, it's where you'll run productive team sprints using integrations with tools you already love and use like Jira for developers, Asana for project managers, Figma for designers and so on. We use Miro and love it to brainstorm future shows, vote on potential guests and leave feedback for the rest of the team in our own time. And right now I'm using it to hear from you. Leave your thoughts on the board at miro.com forward slash 20VC. That's miro.com forward slash 20VC. You have now arrived at your destination. Geoff, I am so excited for this. As I said.
To you before, I've been running listening to your other shows. So thank you so much for joining me today. Super excited to be here.

**Geoff Charles** (2:26)
So I have always been very short-term focus in my career. So I just follow a lot of the energy and I think that's going to be a theme throughout this chat. The first energy was management consulting out of college. So it's all the hype around just how to think, how to structure, how to sell. Then I got kind of bored of PowerPoint presentations. So I wanted to get close to the metal in terms of big data.
And I joined a big data analytics company.
And that's where I got my first foray into product. And I think that the way I did that was getting super close to the customer and understand the customer pain points and then having great relationship with the tech team and understanding like how do we build technology to solve those pain points. And I think the product team kind of came running for there.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:04)
What have been your biggest lessons in how to truly understand customer pain points? Because a lot of people go through customer discovery, but I think we'll both agree many do it badly. What is the best way to really understand customer pain?

**Geoff Charles** (3:16)
I think you kind of have to walk in their shoes for a full day. Like what do they listen to? Go listen to that. What conferences do they go to? Go to that conference.
What are their pain? What are their aspirations?
What does success look like in their role? What is their degree? What do they learn? What is their habits? I spent a lot of time with customers and then it's all about just like asking the right questions. Oftentimes like product managers, they have an idea and they ask the question to validate their idea and it's actually the wrong idea. And so just ask them like, what does success look like here? What is the worst part of your job? What takes a lot of your time? And just continue digging in and digging in and digging in. So and then lastly, like when you do have a product, like sit down next to them or have them share their screen and just watch them do work in your product. And you will see how painful your product is and how many different ways you can improve that product.