Rippling’s product chief has a winning strategy: Put the pedal to the gas until understaffed teams call for backup.
In an episode of “Lenny’s” podcast released on Sunday, Matt MacInnis, the chief product officer of human resource software startup Rippling, said that he purposely gives teams fewer people than they need.
“Everyone is constantly asking for more resources,” he said. “Of course, where we can afford to and where it’s appropriate, new resources arrive, but it is really important to me that we feel that we’ve deliberately understaffed every project at the company.”
MacInnis joined Rippling as its chief operating officer in 2019, before being recently appointed to his role as CPO. He previously cofounded and ran Inkling, a field learning platform that was acquired in 2018.
He added that working late and on weekends when a problem arises, and running a team to its capacity, is what differentiates good and great teams.
“You got to run the engine at the red line at all times,” he said. “Because the minute you let your guard down, the minute you slow down, the minute you relax, the minute you leave a crack for your competition, the great teams are going to come in and kick the good team’s ass.”
He said this is important because employees get distracted and morale dips when teams are given space to “just twiddle their thumbs.” Taking breaks and slowing down also leaves room for other competitors to take market share.
MacInnis added that while individuals should “take vacations and live their lives,” there cannot be relaxation in the organization as a whole.
“You can’t grind the individuals down, but the team as a collective group of people has to be sort of on the ball all the time,” he said.
Rippling was founded in 2017 and is backed by investors including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks, and Y Combinator. It raised $450 million in a May funding round, bringing its valuation to $16.8 billion.
The longtime Rippling exec echoed what Silicon Valley leaders are increasingly saying they want from their workforces. Over the last two years, the tech industry has prioritized rapid growth and doing more with less.
Companies have cut middle-level management in favor of more streamlined teams and fewer tiers of hierarchy, which they say should lead to less bureaucracy.
Across the industry, leaders are sharing memos filled with words such as “efficiency” and “scrappiness and frugality.”
In April, Intel’s CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, outlined his plan for the company’s culture, which included spending more time in the office, reducing administrative work, and forming leaner teams.
“The most important KPI for many managers at Intel has been the size of their teams,” Tan wrote, referring to key performance indicators. “Going forward, this will not be the case. The best leaders get the most done with the fewest people.”
“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Amazon’s Andy Jassy wrote in a September 2024 letter. “That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration.”
In late October, Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate employees, citing the rapid advancement of AI.
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