Why Ramp chose the fastest-moving product tool
Founded in 2019, Ramp powers the fastest-growing corporate card and bill payment platform in America, enabling tens of billions of dollars in purchases each year.
By reimagining technology for back office finance from the ground up, Ramp provides businesses of all sizes and at all stages with the essential tools to modernize finance operations and help their business thrive.
In just a few years, Ramp has grown to over 700 employees and built a high-velocity engineering, product, and design organization, striking the right balance between planning and execution. Through partnering with Linear from the very beginning of its journey, Ramp plans and builds with incredible speed, continuously delivering value to its thousands of customers. As one of the few tools used company-wide, Linear has enabled Ramp to build a beloved product.
The decision to adopt Linear aligned perfectly with Ramp's design philosophy. “When we decided to try Linear originally, the ease of use and care for details and craft in the product resonated with me personally as a designer,” explains Diego Zaks, Vice President of Design.
Ramp thinks deeply about making every hour and every dollar count for businesses. In addition to helping its customers work faster and smarter, they constantly push themselves to do the same with Linear. As Nik Koblov, Head of Engineering, explains, “Our speed is intense and Linear helps us be action biased. We've been using it since day one and it's at the core of our engineering workflow. We can move quickly while remaining organized because everything we want to build gets documented in Linear, the moment it comes up. The team's instinct is to create an issue for every idea, problem, or dependency because it is so fast to do it. This makes collaboration and sharing updates easier.”
Our founders, Karim and Eric, knew that in order to build a product that people love in a space that people hate, you have to give people beautiful tools. This is what Ramp does for finance and this is what Linear does for product building. Everyone deserves beautiful tools.
Ramp is obsessed with design and user experience. Early on, every employee would use the Ramp product as a customer, discover potential improvements and bugs, report and fix them. This constant stream of quality assurance work enabled Ramp to consistently prioritize quality in their product. As Ramp grew, the influx of feedback was constant and unmanageable and they needed to figure out how to scale.
“As we scaled, the goal was to eliminate any friction to enable teams to report product feedback,” Zaks notes. “With Linear, we automated the process so that our team could report feedback and quality issues in Slack, react with an emoji, which creates a Linear issue that is automatically routed to the right team. Each team can then utilize their own process to triage issues in the way that makes sense for them. So while the entry point for feedback is the same for everyone and makes it incredibly easy to give feedback, Linear can be tailored to the process of each team.”
Efficient execution begins with efficient planning. Ramp's entire planning process is optimized for product velocity. In essence, Ramp believes that doing is better than planning. Any second you spend planning is a second you don't spend doing. Linear helps their teams plan for the future, while staying in execution mode.
We recently got rid of other software for Gantt charts and now fully utilize the roadmap view in Linear. It made a big impact for doing quarterly planning and monthly check-ins. You can clearly see what pieces of the roadmap everyone owns and switch from Kanban to list views. We also write our spec lists in Linear, so we have as much context as possible in one place.
The simplicity and flexibility of Linear's product has enabled each team at Ramp to use Linear differently, with pre-built workflows, a common language and shared understanding of the fundamentals. “Each team has the flexibility to use Linear in exactly the way that's most efficient for them,” Zaks shares. “One of the key advantages for our engineering, product and design organization is how we retain talent. We don't tell them how to work, we just let them do the work in the way they desire. If you give people the tools that enable them to do their best work, they'll stick around, so I credit Linear with our ability to retain talent.”
Ramp has created a talent vortex, enabling it to build a high-caliber team, eager to solve a wide range of challenges. By teaming up with Linear from the beginning, Ramp's team has built products which are a competitive advantage for their customers, helping them run their businesses as effectively as possible.