Ramp's engineering team shares seven principles that guide how they build products quickly and with high quality. These include designing systems based on their unique context rather than enforcing consistency, optimizing for reversibility and extensibility over premature optimization, aligning data models with user mental models, collaborating with product and design before coding, being opinionated about product direction, avoiding wrong abstractions while seeking the right ones, and decomposing problems into small components to maximize value with minimal effort. The principles emphasize speed, simplicity, and customer-focused thinking while avoiding unnecessary complexity.
Table of contents
#1: Pick your approach based on the situation at hand#2: Be aggressive when your decisions are reversible; be cautious when they are not#3: Build systems that are aligned with your customers#4: Build opinionated systems, not ones that kick decisions to the user#5: Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction; the right abstraction is cheaper than duplication#6: Build what the customer really needs, not what they ask for#7: Whenever possible, break down projects into small, independent chunks2 Impressions