Move Fast In Proper Sequence

At Rippling, Matt McGinnis approaches product leadership with the conviction that extraordinary results demand extraordinary efforts. This isn't just motivational talk—it's a recognition of the power law dynamics that govern business outcomes. When you're aiming for the 99th percentile in results, the relationship between effort and reward isn't linear but exponential.

McGinnis believes that if team members ever find themselves in their comfort zone at work, they've made a mistake. The most valuable moments often come when teams are pushed to their limits—when they're tired but continue pushing forward. This is when great teams separate themselves from merely good ones.

A core principle in his leadership approach is deliberate understaffing. When staffing projects, McGinnis intentionally provides fewer resources than might seem optimal. His reasoning: overstaffing leads to politics and work on lower-priority items, creating waste and cruft. By understaffing deliberately, teams focus intensely on what truly matters. The wisdom comes in knowing when you've crossed from deliberate understaffing into dangerous territory.

McGinnis frames his thinking through the lens of "alpha" (outperformance) versus "beta" (volatility). In different contexts, you need different balances—some products need high alpha with acceptable beta (innovation with some unpredictability), while others (like payroll) demand low beta above all else. This framework extends to people, processes, and products, helping determine where to apply rigid structure versus where to allow creative freedom.

When building systems, McGinnis recognizes that entropy—the natural tendency toward disorder—is constantly working against you. The only antidote is continuously injecting energy. Teams naturally optimize for local comfort over company outcomes, and each layer of management risks diluting the founder's intensity by an order of magnitude. As a leader, your job isn't to buffer people from intensity but to preserve and mirror it.

For product teams specifically, McGinnis emphasizes that everything must be done in sequence. You can't skip steps. Before worrying about adoption metrics, ensure you have fundamentals like quality standards and testing coverage in place. He created a "pickle" (Product Quality List) that provides lightweight but clear standards for shipping products, iterating on it with each lesson learned.

The practical implications for teams are significant. When you receive feedback or encounter problems, treat them as gifts rather than inconveniences. Withholding feedback is selfish—you're optimizing for your comfort rather than others' improvement. Escalate issues quickly and publicly so everyone can learn. And remember that while intensity is necessary, it should be paired with perspective—none of this ultimately matters, which paradoxically makes it easier to give it your all.

Balancing Process and Innovation

McGinnis views processes as tools that exist solely to lower beta (decrease volatility) in a system. The downside is that processes can suppress alpha (innovation and outperformance). The art of leadership is implementing just enough process in the right places—rigid where you need reliability, light where you need creativity.

When building products, this means recognizing which areas need consistent, predictable outcomes versus which need space for innovation. For a payroll product, reliability trumps novelty. For new product categories, the opposite might be true. The key is being deliberate about where you place constraints.

First Principles Over Imported Frameworks

Despite his love of frameworks, McGinnis is skeptical of importing ideas without breaking them down to first principles. When someone proposes using a framework or concept, he asks them to explain it without using the term itself. This forces clarity and reveals whether they truly understand the underlying principles or are just repeating buzzwords.

This approach extends to how he evaluates product market fit. Rather than deluding yourself with optimism, recognize that the market is immutable—no amount of marketing will create demand that doesn't exist. Like drug discovery, your job is to find out whether binding receptors exist for your product, not to convince the body to develop them.

For teams, this means grounding decisions in firsthand observations rather than abstract theories, and being willing to abandon approaches that aren't working, even when conventional wisdom says to persist.