Jeremy Henrickson
Jeremy Henrickson is Rippling’s SVP of Product, responsible for scaling their product and design team across three continents. Previously, as Chief Product Officer at Coinbase, he oversaw 10x growth of the product and engineering organization and transformed a scrappy startup into a global cryptocurrency platform with tens of millions of users. He began his career at Apple in the 1990s and holds a BS and MS in computer science from Stanford.
Building & Shipping Skills
Maintaining velocity at scale requires partitioning large problems into small, mission-driven teams to minimize horizontal communication overhead.
"I think there's kind of a universal truth that you want small teams with clear missions. Right? If there's 300 people trying to work on one thing, the just sheer communication challenges, Dunbar's num..."
Career (separate track) Skills
True understanding of complex challenges comes from leaders 'diving deep' into the trenches alongside teams on their most difficult problems.
"It's very, very tempting to float up here as a leader and say, "Hey, you take that hill over there. You guys do this over here." When in fact, where you really learn where the challenges are, or the p..."
Planning & Prioritization Skills
In environments of extreme uncertainty, leadership must resolve open debates into a single, unified company direction to maintain execution speed.
"The biggest challenge was that in crypto there's just so much uncertainty in general, simple questions like, is Ethereum going to be a thing, are the subject of debate. And no one actually at the time..."
Team & Organization Skills
Decision-making speed increases when management structures are transparent enough for senior leaders to provide direct feedback to teams without intermediaries.
"I think that's the other, maybe the key point here that everyone is exposed senior leadership, yes, we have a management structure because you have to, but that management structure does not interfere..."
Incubate new product lines by isolating a tiny, talented team with a monomaniacal focus on one specific problem.
"And those four people over the course of maybe nine months or so, built a time and attendance product. It was the only thing they were doing. They didn't have to worry about what was going on with our..."