Everyone Thinks Like a PM

Scale product leadership by making engineers and designers think like PMs

Geoff Charles
Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup ever | Geoff Charles

Everyone Thinks Like a PM

"By eliminating or reducing the size of the team, we've forced other people in the company to think like PMs and I think it's been a huge value add to our culture." - Geoff Charles

What It Is

Everyone Thinks Like a PM is Ramp's approach to scaling product leadership by distributing PM capabilities across the team rather than hiring more PMs. By maintaining an extremely high PM-to-engineer ratio (1:8 to 1:15), Ramp forces engineers and designers to develop product thinking—understanding customers, making prioritization decisions, and owning outcomes.

The key insight is that PMs are "force multipliers"—they can't build anything themselves. If you view the PM job as empowering engineers and designers to think like PMs, you need fewer PMs and get better outcomes. The people closest to the work make better decisions when they think holistically.

Ramp achieved $100 million ARR with only 3 PMs supporting nearly 50 engineers. This ratio only works because everyone thinks like a PM.

How It Works

What PMs stop doing:

  • Writing tickets
  • Spending time in the ticket management system
  • Detailed specs beyond vision and priority
  • Project management and status tracking

What engineers and designers start doing:

  • Thinking about priorities and scopes
  • Breaking down their own work
  • Owning the end-to-end project delivery
  • Understanding customer problems and business context

The PM role becomes:

  • Vision and priority
  • High-level spec and direction
  • Alignment on goals and strategy
  • Team culture and connection
  • Shielding the team from external chaos

The contract: "Basically, our contract is the vision and the priority and a very high-level spec and everything else is pushed on the engineering teams."

How to Apply It

1. Set the expectation that everyone is product "When I say product, often people think about product management, but I actually think product is anyone that actually reports into our CTO, and that's product engineering, product design, product managers, product data scientists."

2. Empower designers to own specs and priorities "Empowering the designer to think about the actual specs and priorities and scopes more than you."

3. Give engineers ownership, not tasks "Empower the engineer to take something that's fairly lightweight in terms of a spec or direction and actually think through it deeply and come back with some great questions that the PM hasn't thought through."

4. Let engineers own project breakdown "They can create whatever tickets they want, they can break down the work that they want, they are accountable for the projects that they're driving."

5. Invest in Product Operations for the PM-adjacent work Handle project management, release management, enablement, and customer research through a dedicated product operations team—not through more PMs.

When to Use It

  • When hiring A-plus engineering and design talent
  • When you want to maintain high velocity with a small PM team
  • When engineers complain about being "ticket takers"
  • When you have the cultural foundation for empowerment

Prerequisites

This approach requires:

  • A-plus talent - Engineers must be capable of product thinking
  • Strong vision/strategy - Clear direction that doesn't require constant PM input
  • Trust - Leaders must actually let go of solution decisions
  • Product operations - Someone handles the operational PM work

The Trade-off

Engineers and designers with product opinions can be harder to manage—they'll push back on decisions and have strong views. But this is a feature: "I'll take someone on my team any day that challenges what I tell them to do."

You're also raising the bar for who you can hire. Not every engineer wants this responsibility or can handle it.

Source

  • Guest: Geoff Charles
  • Episode: "Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup ever | Geoff Charles"
  • Key Discussion: (00:58:06) - How Ramp scales PM leverage
  • YouTube: Watch on YouTube

Related Frameworks

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