Rippling structures teams into business units led by GMs who oversee product, sales, and implementation. This is driven by the belief that a unified team focused on a specific customer problem (e.g., IT) delivers a superior end-to-end experience compared to a traditional matrixed organization.
To scale a high-performing product team, hire individuals who exhibit the same level of ownership and love for the product as the original founders. This means prioritizing a blend of deep curiosity, leadership potential, and an unwavering commitment to execution over a simple skills checklist.
Large companies like Rippling and TripActions maintain innovation velocity by creating "carved out" teams for new, "zero to one" initiatives. This organizational strategy provides singular focus, empowering a small group to execute with the intensity and speed of an early-stage startup without corporate distractions.
Instead of viewing platform constraints as a weakness, Rippling's PMs leverage shared components, like its powerful 'groups' feature, to create superior product experiences. This turns the platform into a competitive advantage for individual product lines, not a compromise on quality, by offering capabilities standalone products lack.
Effective strategic planning prioritizes identifying one or two "step change" bets that could fundamentally alter growth or customer experience. This focuses the team on high-impact swings first, with the rest of the roadmap, including incremental improvements and customer feedback, sequenced around these core initiatives.
Rippling's CEO models a "go and see" culture by personally investigating customer issues down to the chat logs. This top-down behavior sets the standard for the entire company, ensuring even at scale, teams stay deeply connected to the real customer experience to maintain high product quality.