Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase)

It's very, very tempting to, to kind of float up here as a leader and say, "Hey, you know, you take that hill over there. You guys do this over here," when in fact, like, what, where you really learn where the challenges are, or the problems, or the successes is by, like, just, like, being there (laughs) with, with the people in the trenches on, like, one of the things, like, whichever one seems hardest or most complicated. And so I try to do that as often as I can, and I found that I always learn (laughs) a lot by, by going through that detailed exercise.

(Instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Jeremy Henriksen. Jeremy is senior vice president of Product at Rippling, where he leads the product and design teams. Previously, he was chief product officer at Coinbase, where he oversaw 10X growth of the product and engineering organizations and helped scale Coinbase during one of the craziest times in the crypto markets. In our conversation, Jeremy shares his lessons about maintaining velocity of scale, creating a culture of fast decision making, the importance of product leaders going deep on a problem and becoming world experts at their domain, what to look for in product managers you're interviewing, why relying on frameworks can be so detrimental to your success, why you may want to avoid MVPs and instead design for the most complex use cases first, and tons more. Enjoy this episode with Jeremy Henriksen after a short word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours. The best way to see what Miro's all about and how it can help your team collaborate better is not to listen to me talk about it, but to go check it out for yourself. Go to miro.com/lenny. With the help of the Miro team, I created a super cool Miro board with two of my own favorite templates, my one-pager template and my managing up template, that you can plug and play and start using immediately with your team. I've also embedded a handful of my favorite templates that other people have published in the Miroverse. When you get to the board, you can also leave suggestions for the podcast, answer a question that I have for you, and generally just play around to get a sense of how it all works. Miro is a killer tool for brainstorming with your team, laying out your strategy, sharing user research findings, capturing ideas, giving feedback on wireframes, and generally just collaborating with your colleagues. I actually used Miro to collaborate with the Miro team on creating my own board. And it was super fun and super easy. Go check it out at miro.com/lenny. That's M-I-R-O.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Mixpanel. Get deep insights into what your users are doing at every stage of the funnel at a fair price that scales as you grow. Mixpanel gives you quick answers about your users from awareness, to acquisition, through retention. And by capturing website activity, ad data, and multi-touch attribution right in Mixpanel, you can improve every aspect of the full user funnel. Powered by first party behavioral data instead of third party cookies, Mixpanel is built to be more powerful and easier to use than Google Analytics. Explore plans for teams of every size and see what Mixpanel can do for you at mixpanel.com/friends/lenny. And while you're at it, they're also hiring, so check it out at mixpanel.com/friends/lenny. Jeremy, welcome to the podcast.