 Hello to everybody joining us online and welcome to our product school show today. I am so excited I'm Chantelle de Grey product marketing manager here at product school and joining me today We have Jeremy Henriksen SVP of product at rippling. How's it going Jeremy? It's going great. Good evening to you. I guess in Paris. It's nice to see you Nice to see you as well. We thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate having you here We've got a pretty packed agenda of ways that we want to pick your brain and see how product is truly done at rippling So I'm gonna go ahead and just you know pass it over to you Can you tell us a little bit about your personal history how you got started in product and who you are? Sure, so maybe I'll go way back. I grew up in South Dakota born in Minnesota But grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I was just a shy kid to like really like like problem-solving and puzzles I was blessed with three little brothers and so I made games for them like all the time and while I didn't think of that as product What I realized kind of later in life was like the seeds of like the product first I was going to be was going to become like we're born of like creating those experiences for them and You know that later translated into like learning how to code on my Apple 2 plus and basic and writing adventure games and Eventually like you know once I got to college it became my thing and I was a computer science guy But I very quickly realized that at least for me like the engineering was like super interesting But like what I really loved was like the interactions with people around Computers around each other around computers and around other kind of computing devices And while at the time, you know, there was no like product management discipline or school or thing you could go to I realized that that was sort of where I was kind of kind of headed toward and so To make a relatively long shorty store it after I finished graduate school I was at this company called reactivity, which was part of the internet one era And no one really knew how to use the internet at the time And so we were doing consulting and starting new companies around like hey How do you use this internet thing and what interesting things can you do with it? And so in that in the process of doing that I talked with like dozens of companies that were trying to get off the ground figuring out how to build their products and That's where I really became I would say a product manager Even though I didn't have the title product manager until my next job at a guide wire back in the back of the odds And then kind of the rest of sort of history. I've been been a sort of hybrid product engineering Design person like ever since I've just kind of really loved the last of 20 years or so of doing that kind of kind of thing We definitely didn't talk about this and we are going through the questions But you said that you are into computer science is probably what you studied if you had to go back and redo your education Would you study the same thing? 100% I mean, well, okay, hold on believe so I'm also sort of a musician So maybe if I were to do it again, I would go become a conductor even though I eliminated that as a career choice in my 20s So I love music, but like if I were going to become a product manager again 100% computer science Engineering would be is the right place to start because I think as a product leader I mean, it's extremely difficult to make good choices unless you actually understand the implications of those choices in software And what it means for an engineer to actually have to build something or make a trade-off between Like getting something out tomorrow or like architecting at the right way and getting it out two days later or whatever And so I think having that deep Hands-on experience of having built stuff, you know written code and like getting pretty good at it I think is a it's a really important kind of background element to many great product leaders Amazing. Well, you know that brings us to a great segue to our next question Which is as product people we always reinforce this idea of falling in love with a problem and not just the solution So can you tell us a little bit about the problems you're passionate about solving at riffling? Yeah, sure. So I Think when I'd like to answer like a little bit of like context about how I think about like choosing places to work because rippling It's just a great example of that And for me, it's about believing that there's something like fundamentally transformative about about the thesis of the company And so in rippling's case the thesis is the problem statement is that today's systems are all super disconnected before rippling You have a payroll system and it has like your name and your email address in it and your kind of address You have an insurance system Which has the same thing of a device management system and a recruiting system and a time in the tennis system You have dozens of systems at companies and like none of them are the source of truth None of them and so what ends up happening is you have either really janky integrations between all these systems Which like poor IT people desperately try to keep up But that's that's never good enough because you also have to have human beings like update this data So if I move from here it in sunny, California to Paris, right? Well, somebody has to make that change in the system and make sure they're making the right changes at the right time and it's in It's an enormous burden and it's not fun and it's extremely error-prone And it's not good and this has happened because there's been a disaggregation of systems over the last two decades That is a big Hairy problem, especially when you extend it beyond there to like the community of like thousands of other like ancillary products that companies need to use All of which by the way are also dependent on understanding that employee data And so for me, that's just a problem That's really really rich with like possibility and like a decade's worth at least for my intellect of like of finding interesting things to think about And extremely importantly, I believe that of the many potential solutions like the one that we have chosen It's like fundamentally good for people And it's not just about falling in love with a problem for me But but it's all I have kids two kids now They're eight and six when I started this job They were you know six and four and it's really important for me to be able to tell them Hey look here's how your dad's spending time and like I'm actually making people's lives better And here's the way in which I'm making it better That's something I actually can explain to my kids now which which I value very highly Amazing well, let's dive into that a little bit more What's an example of a product that your team has launched recently or built recently that you're super proud of? Man, there's so many But I think I have to go with our global launch So maybe a month month and a half ago we announced that you know, we were going global and what does that mean for us? Well up until you know very recently We basically just served United States based companies and they're United States based employees and contractors I'm like we had integrations that would like you know allow you to pay people and you know France or UK or India or wherever But that experience is not the unified like single system experience you want And so we've done a ton of work over the last year extremely quickly to be able to say no no no Not only can we directly support like your employees in Canada and the India and the UK and everywhere else in the world And we've now been paying our own employees via our own systems the inexperience. It's like one button You don't have to do this four different times in four different places and like wait forever It's just a seamless like magical experience, which is really cool And not only can we do that but we're also about to be able to support companies that are not headquartered here Right, so if you're a Canadian company with Canadian employees You happen to have remote employees in the United States or somewhere else Well, that's gonna work too and you know and ditto for all the rest of companies and so that launch Has been has been really really fun in a number of dimensions like one It's just a complicated thing right to make that work to go from like one country to many countries to it requires a Cultural change which is one of the things I always love about companies when they go global You end up kind of have you you end up like leaving this extremely kind of United States centric point of view with Color spelled incorrectly in the word zip code in there and all those things to everybody in the company Needing to think about why what they do every single day needs to be thought of in a different like more global way and I love That transformation inside of a company that happens when you do it I'm just like really really proud of the team through have being able to like affect that transition in such like a relatively short period of time It's the second time that you mentioned that it has been a fast or short period of time that this has happened I want to dive in there Can you can you expand a little bit more on that and maybe some of the hurdles that are sometimes associated with moving fast? Yeah, so I think One has to be very very careful to say like fast does not equal bad Right fast just meet fast to me is not about like the move fast break things philosophy Facebook made famous right fast Is about focus right? It's about understanding what you need to build and not wasting time and energy and effort like doing things that you don't like That aren't productive towards your end goal and like sometimes you don't sometimes you don't have that benefit Sometimes you you don't know what the end goal is right and you have no choice But to like you know throw a spaghetti at the wall in a bunch of different ways And it's really frustrating when things don't work out But for us like we more or less know what we need the question is how do you do it? How do you do effectively in a different way and leveraging for us? You know this single source of truth that we have on the platform that we've built around that and And and and and and so going quickly is all about having a deep deep understanding of the domain and a deep deep understanding of our kind of differentiators as a platform and like getting the whole team aligned kind of toward that that set of work and Then of course like you know being demanding about timelines like wait Why why is this going to take until like February 1st? Why can't it take till January 1st and like you talk about that question, right? And you realize people have all these assumptions their heads about the things they need to do in order for it to like You know half my February 1st But like oftentimes those things are not necessary not to building a great product, right? If they're necessary to building great product then you have to do them But sometimes they're not right and so like really understanding what matters and what doesn't I think is the key to like moving Very very quickly and then of having a culture of like deciding things now Like you could wait to schedule a meeting next week with a committee of seven people or you could like call slack Call somebody like literally right now get them on the line and make the best decision You can and like are you gonna make wrong decisions every once in a while? Sure, right? But if they're reversible it's not a big deal and most of the decisions are are not that are not of that caliber And so we really really biased toward making decisions as quickly as we can I Love that for the folks who maybe are thinking of applying to work at Ripley Can you give us the sneak peek about what like are you guys using an okr framework? How are you coming up with these things that say we prioritize moving fast and making decisions quickly? So I don't think you can really capture that in in like numbers usually like of course There are numbers that we are trying to like to manage toward life Hey, how many support tickets are there or you know, how many customers are using this feature or how often are they using that thing? But for us there's a more fundamental thing which is just like when we build a new product And we don't really bring like tiny features I mean we do bring tiny features to market But like if you're a product leader here like you own the product right in the market And so the question is how do we make this a great differentiated product both for ourselves as we are our most Difficult customer by far right and then you know How do we make sure that customers are going to kind of accept and and use it and like that's the litmus test and for us It's about do you understand the ways in which having a single system of record allows you to build like a highly differentiated product? So as a product leader here, you're thinking about those things right? You're thinking about how can I create this experience? How can I think it all the way through such that like Everyone from like the VP of the function down to an employee to that manager over there to the business partner to the partner That's like using this all have this like sublime experience like going through it where it's just like is is an experience I could not have had should should they have chosen any of those system and like that's the metric And it is in some ways a subjective judgment But once you've been here for a while like it becomes like super clear like what that what that would be kind of dimensions of that subjective judgment are Very cool amazing. So how do you find ways to? Motivate your team and perform in this hyper growth scenario. You've got going on at Ripley Yeah, it helps to have the hyper growth there So so for us, it's you know, we we believe in keeping the product organization like relatively thin And what that means is that as a product leader here you come in and you have a very large scope of responsibility Perhaps even slightly unreasonably large It's it's liberally but then it's like look, this is yours You are expected to be like the expert in his zone You're expected to lead the rest of the company in doing this And so the way the way I try to motivate people is by persuading them of like the Significance and depth of that role, which is like very different from places people have usually come from And then to actually hold them accountable for it and it's in the holding accountable like wait You expect you to do that in my first week like yeah Totally, right and and people like get understanding that like this is a career accelerator, right? Because you're doing you're doing so much the scope of ownership is is so broad and then of course I'm there to coach and support them, right? I'm I'm a relatively like Hands off is probably the wrong word But like let people like do their own thing and then like either to support them or catch them or say I don't think you're approaching this right to intervene and say like here What can I do to make sure you're gonna be successful? In this and I found that you know It's not always a cultural fit like everyone slow and make a hiring mistake and like that doesn't work out But like when it does work out people are extremely motivated to like do their very very best work And and and they feel like super proud of what they've been able to build So as long as I can keep like doing things in such a way that people feel like really proud of the work They've done and feel like they're having an opportunity to have that ownership. I think we'll do okay Very cool. This is kind of just going a little bit deeper into that question But how do you find ways to support career progression of your teams? So I think career progression is a funny thing, right because different people define it differently You know, it's for some people career progression is I want to manage a lot of people That kind of career career progression is like not really here at Rivlin Like yeah, there are people who manage people but like the the objective is not to like acquire like the most massive team that you can The objective is to truly lead Your product here and become the expert like And the ideal state is like look you should be in a Parker who's our founder and has like this brilliant product Mind for like the sweetest products we have, you know All he wants is for to be able to have product leaders who whose areas he can ignore to say like look I could drop off the face of the universe for six months or for a year and come back and be blown away at the state of the product Right and that is career progression in product like achieving that ideal state Right and all of the things you have to do to go from being really really good at building a feature To like owning a product and like that is a very very long I mean that's neat 20 years like and I'm still learning right and so and so I think like Making sure that people recognize that that's that is the opportunity here. All right, and I'm look I think there are different there are different kinds of like product leadership from product ownership that that people can have and Rippling is gonna be right for some people and not for others But for people who do like that kind of style Rippling, I think it's a really great place to learn and grow through people's careers Very cool again I'm trying to give you the plug for all those folks hoping to work at Rippling Can you talk us through in a little bit more detail like what kind of roles in product teams exist at Rippling What is the area of possibility there? Yeah, I mean we have so we have roles kind of across the board I'll give us I'll give us a few examples of ones that are right now. So I mentioned the global release And so we are looking for a product leader on that team to be the leader for a number of countries in the world, right? Be the expert in Germany's already taken Germany was like one of them like France all the rest like we're going into all the major countries in the world And we need people who are willing to go deep there We are looking for a leader for our insurance and benefits products So this is like a more mature product which still has a ton of innovation particularly the roots back to the global stuff Right, we went global now suddenly we need to support global benefits in every country in the world And that that's not that's not an easy not an easy gig We have kind of earlier stage like new products We always kick off new products with just an engineer But once like we like built like that first version of product There are kind of earlier stage places where like product leaders can can be a really really great fit as well We have a few examples that within our finance suite. So there's few few kind of examples of the kinds of things we're hiring for Very cool. Very cool. Okay, you have obviously excelled as a leader And it sounds like you're pretty passionate about leading products over at Rippling Can you share some of the ways that you built up those leadership skills and how you're continuing to develop and challenge yourself today? Yeah, I learned long ago that I learned by doing like in college Like I was way better at the project courses than I was at the ones where you fill out bubbles at the end of the thing and get like test scores And so for me, it's always just been about I learned by doing I find something I'm either not good at or want to be better at or whatever and like I'll go do it And so as an example right now We're working on a couple of kind of capabilities for large customers like headcount planning and compensation pass and the like And I decided hey, this isn't right. I just like to learn no more about and so I've been working directly with a product leader kind of of that. So we've just been building the thing Together for the last couple of months Which has helped me really understand that domain particularly but also A new set of platform capabilities that we've been building which I understood at like a high level But hadn't yet gone deep on and so this kind of constantly like kind of Revisiting things that I used to know or things that are like are new or whatever something. I just try to build in To my cadence as much as as much as I can Because I find I can only be a good product leader if I actually know like the details of what's going on Very cool. I think I'm saying very cool to all of your answers, but it's because I'm finding them extremely engaging Yeah, well that's great I like to think of them as like hard-learned lessons, but also like totally wrong sometimes Everybody's going to say something else from here. I'm like, wow, you know what? I should have been doing it that way And that's not this other way. So Um, it's good. Well, everyone's path is like the curvy way, right? There's no one way otherwise Even if there was I mean, that's why we all talk about the matrix and waking up from the matrix, right? So better to have an interesting life than a straightforward one 100% agree. Yeah So, you know, we are on the cusp of december last month of the year It's not necessarily last month at the quarter for everybody depending on your fiscal year But as we look forward to the new year, can you tell us a little bit about what are your top three goals? Going into the new year or for the new year Yeah, um So, uh, there's a set of things I can talk about and not talk about You know, obviously this global expansion piece is like enormously important to us We think that companies will only succeed in the next five or 10 years in our domain if they can serve companies globally And oddly, I think a lot of these companies are not positioned to be able to do that But we want to make sure that we are like the de facto answer there. And so that's a huge area of emphasis Um, a secondary of emphasis for us is like larger customers Um, so, you know, we have customers that range from like, you know, two people in a garage, you know To like, you know five six thousand folks Um, but we want to continuously kind of push push those boundaries up and make it a like a really great product for the 10 Thousand person company, which I think we could serve that customer today But it's not as good as I want it to be right and so we can do it We can do better and that's partly just like hey, we have to build some other products We haven't built yet And partly a few other kind of capabilities. And so that's really important to us as well Um, and again, we are our own most difficult customer here And we're never ever going to use any product other than ourselves. So I have faith that we'll do that scaling And then I would say like also the the other thing that's kind of changed structurally is like parker can only do so much Right, like he you know, he's kind of a force of nature But from a product organization standpoint The leaders of each of these functions need to be able to pull all the way up and like be The source of truth for the company on those things and historically parker has always had to dive in Because he's wanted to be really hands-on and understand the product really well But like we're out scaling that and so helping my product leaders get to a point where they can serve that function As well as parker does is a huge emphasis of of the next year Got it. Got it. Those are some some big goals that you've set out Do you think that you'll accomplish those within the next 12 months? Yes Okay, amazing. Yeah, I don't think it's be easy, right? I think and if there's things like that will go like particularly well, there's things that you know We'll struggle with right like like any journey doing something that hard, but um, One thing I have faith is our ability to execute Very cool Very cool So I want to go back on a point that you mentioned you said that you don't think a lot of companies are Fully adopting that mindset of go global or don't be here in the next decade to kind of reframe what you said Why do you think that is? Actually, don't even necessarily think it's not that they don't have that that frame of mind though, you know in our market like Many companies have grown up being like just us only or just like Germany only or just like some other company only And it's a technical problem Because like once if you baked in those assumptions like into the code Extremely deeply and the culture of the company doesn't have like this this understanding of global stuff. It's extremely difficult So like escape like that gravitational pull and so So number one, I don't think everyone's had the realization that they're gonna have to be global And then to the extent people have had the realization I just think the the path to get there Is much more difficult for some companies than others and by the way, I do think there are companies that will make it Right for sure like, you know, there's there's other smart people in the world But but um, but I think it's a challenge. It's a really challenging thing to do Well, it requires a deep commitment to a very clear path And then of course you have to have like the people that that can do the work Um, and so I think we're lucky to have all three of those but like some companies are just going to have a harder road than we are Well, maybe the road will be a little easier if they use rippling All right, let's go back to some of your more career path And your your experience growing as a product leader questions So how would you disambiguate the product career path or roadmap? Yeah, so I think um For me, I draw a distinction between People who are like really good at like the process of product management versus product Right and I I personally value the latter of those two things far more than than the former Because I think at the moment you talk about like tools and process And and like all those things you're you're not talking about the fundamental thing Which is building something that's going to be correct for the customer All right, and so You know for for my you know My personal journey has been one of having like just barely enough process to be able to like hold together Like a rational like plan Right and then everything else is about setting things up to get to the right decisions For the product or the best decisions you can make at a given point in time They're not always right But at least the best decisions you can make at a given point in time And then and my view like the best product leaders are good at that and then are really good at spreadsheets So to like, you know, talk about stuff together and then when you have to like you get good at Your or something right and then and then you have to go to mockups, but like that's that's it Right that every everything else is kind of noise And there are definitely things you need to do in order to scale companies There are definitely things you need to do in order to run large teams and those things are all fine But they're secondary Relative to getting the product as right as possible Okay, so getting that product as right as possible. I'm guessing that there is some piece of insight there about how to do that So I don't know that there's a magic a silver bullet here I mean, I can tell I can tell you what it is for me And for me, it's two things right it is number one Having as deep a possible understanding of your domain Right and that is a necessary but not sufficient Criteria and the second one is you have to have a thesis which you're applying to that problem Right something that makes your particular solution You know an order of magnitude better than whatever came before And so understanding how to apply that thesis to that problem in a way that creates a uniquely better solution Is is the kind of other the other piece of of magic and then being able to divine Like additional things that kind of kind of accrue to that thesis Like so for example at at rippling like the initial thesis was hey look You need a single system of record right and that was enough to start building something that was very different But now that's evolved to a whole platform of capabilities where Permissions that can be determined based on any attribute of the user Workflow and automation that's aware of the organization a degree of configurability that lets every company do whatever they need to do idiosyncratically A deep and and systemic reporting infrastructure Shared commenting all of these different things which were there at the beginning of the thesis But have been additive to it and now anytime you build a new product at rippling Of any scale you think through this library of differentiators and say wait a minute I can do this set of things that no one else in the market can do because I can take advantage of not just the thesis But the set of things have grown around it And so it's the combination of understanding the problem deeply and understanding the differentiators deeply That if you if you can bring it together And like stay grounded in what customers actually need which is the other hard thing to do You can build a great product Amazing We are coming up to almost time So i'm gonna close things out with one last question Which is if you had a time machine and you could go back to the very beginning to your younger self when you're first starting out What advice would you give yourself to get further in your product career? Oh man, I uh, it's a great question. I I think there are two Things that I would tell myself um Number one is that accomplishing anything significant is always hard and is always unreasonable All right, I spent a lot of time struggling when I was younger with this like balance between well How how hard do I want to work? How much do I want to commit myself to my work and you kind of have to make a call It's like if you're committed to your work or you're not but second You also have to know what else you need to be like happy and satisfied in your life And you have to you have to make sure that you construct your life So you have time for that too and while if there can be attention between those two things I think Finding as early as possible in your career like what like really understanding what you truly need what you truly care about That personal journey that introspection like you know the going through the fire like I wish I'd been able to go through more of that earlier because the point about now I'm like super happy. I have these two kids that you know, I read to every day I finished reading Lord of the Rings to my son like last weekend We're watching the movies like totally awesome Coming to a place where like I understood that's the balance. I wanted was really hard And so I wish I would have had like somebody in my life like back then who could have like Helped point me a little more in that direction Well, there's always options for mentorship with product school And I'm sure you have tons of people flooding into your dms If not before definitely after this session going well Here I am help me out. So Wonderful awesome. No, I look forward to it Well, thank you so much Jeremy for joining us. We are fully at time I'm gonna close us out with our awesome video But any last remarks that you want to give us before we switch over to that No, thank you so much. It's been it's been fun chatting with you and I appreciate the time and thanks to you to everyone Who's listening for spending time tuning in Amazing. Thank you to our wonderful audience to have a great rest of your day