Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase)

**Jeremy Henrickson** (0:00)
It's very, very tempting to float up here as a leader and say, hey, you take that hill over there, you guys do this over here.
When in fact, where you really learn where the challenges are or the problems or the successes is by just being there with the people in the trenches on one of the things, whichever one seems hardest or most complicated. And so I try to do that as often as I can, and I found that I always learn a lot by going through that detailed exercise.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:31)
Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Jeremy Henrickson. Jeremy is Senior Vice President of Product at Rippling, where he leads the product and design teams. Previously, he was Chief Product Officer at Coinbase, where he oversaw 10X growth of the product and engineering organizations and helped scale Coinbase during one of the craziest times in the crypto markets. In our conversation, Jeremy shares his lessons about maintaining velocity at scale, creating a culture of fast decision-making, the importance of product leaders going deep on a problem and becoming world experts at their domain, what to look for in product managers you're interviewing, why relying on frameworks can be so detrimental to your success, why you may want to avoid MVPs and instead design for the most complex use cases first, and tons more. Enjoy this episode with Jeremy Henrickson after a short word from our sponsors.
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Jeremy, welcome to the podcast.

**Jeremy Henrickson** (3:30)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:32)
So I've heard nothing but amazing things about you and I'm excited to learn from what you've learned from your experience at Rippling, at Coinbase and all of the products and teams that you've built. And so thank you again for being here.

**Jeremy Henrickson** (3:44)
Yeah, super happy to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:46)
So I wanna start with your time at Coinbase where you're a Chief Product Officer and you're a Chief Product Officer during maybe the craziest time in the crypto markets. It was I think 2016, 2018, when I was looking at the Bitcoin prices and it went from like $1,000 to $20,000, I think in a matter of months. So I'm curious, what was that experience like?
And in particular, what was like leading a product team through that experience?

**Jeremy Henrickson** (4:10)
The strongest memories for me are during like 2017 where crypto, which had kind of been at its nadir in like early 2016, it kind of slowly started climbing out, just kind of took off and became a real thing in the public consciousness. And Coinbase, which at the time had an exchange just like on-ramp and off-ramp from fiat to crypto and back, experienced over the course of 2017, 40X growth in usage.