Podcast review: Behind the Craft – Inside Ramp

I found the Behind the Craft: Inside Ramp (spotify.com) podcast an interesting watch. You can find it on Spotify or directly on the Behind the Craft site. The interview is with Geoff Charles (ramp.com), the CPO of Ramp, a fintech platform for corporate cards, and about how they are using AI to build.

I didn’t agree with some of what Mr Charles said, but it was thought provoking.

Some of the funny and/or controversial takes were:

• “a lot of PMS join product management because they might not be good enough at the engineering task”. Wow. That is a controversial opinion, especially from a CPO.
• Geoff suggested leaders should cancel 1-1s to focus on building their API skills. Personally I agree with leaders doing everything can to get up to speed with AI tools, including hands on experience, but not at the expense of neglecting your direct reports & team.

Other highlights…

• How Ramp use AI
  • 50% of code at Ramp is built by AI, and they expect that to rise to 80%.
  • They encourage everyone to become a “builder” including Product Managers.
  • To help with this, they built their own background coding agent, called Inspect, to go beyond standard coding assistants by providing complete agency, context, and access to the exact same tools a Ramp engineer uses.
• “If you are not using Claude code, you are likely underperforming” and Claude skills was mentioned several times
• PMs need to reskill. They should be using AI tools to turn specs in to code.
• On leadership:
  • Remove constraints around access, tools, tokens, budget.
  • Don’t optimize for management. Optimize for being the best builder in the world.
  • The job of leaders in this time of AI is to identify problems in the process.
  • “Our job is to automate our jobs”
• Cancel 1-1s to focus on building
  • It’s a tough time to be a manager right. Your team’s skill set needs to change and you might not have that skill set.
  • Going back to IC mode is paramount. Be in way less meetings, less 1-1s. Instead, be adopting AI tools. Building, vibe code and understand what’s working. Become more educated. The sheer amount of changes that happened over even the last three months is profound.
  • If you’re stuck in meetings, you’re not gonna be effective. You need to prioritize learning and growth. It’s gonna be a wild ride.
• Ramp think about being AI proficient in multiple levels
  • Folks at lower levels may be hard to train and may even need to move on from the company.
  • The goal is to get everyone to move up a level.
  • The levels are:
    1. May occasionally use ChatGPT (perhaps as a google alternative)
    2. Uses custom GPTs. Have built a Notion agent. Maybe uses Claude code.
    3. Have built an app that automates part of their job
    4. Fundamental AI-first, system builders

• For recruitment, filter for AI skills. “We have an requirement for anyone who joins the company to be proficient” with AI tools.

 

 

Tags: AI, artificialintelligence, claude, podcast