Launch Legends: Subham Agarwal's Approach to Ramp's Second Act

As investors, we often struggle to underwrite the value of “Act 2” and “Act 3.” In this series, we go behind the scenes with product leaders with a consistent track record of building and scaling products that have changed the course of their business.?

This first interview is with Subham Agarwal, Ramp’s Product Management and Marketing Leader and Primary’s newest Fintech Advisor. In 2025, when most startups in and around fintech are still pursuing single-product strategies, Ramp has been plotting a different course.

First, congrats on the Ramp Treasury launch. Twitter is ablaze.

Thank you, thank you. To quote what one of our team members said on launch day: “On one hand, launching is a huge milestone representing a lot of hard work. On the other hand, all launching means is we've smashed champagne on the side of the ship.” In other words, the team is excited but it’s still Day 1.

You've been described as part of Ramp's "SEAL Team Six"—driving some of its most valuable products. What's the journey been like?

I've been at Ramp for four years, and my remit has changed every 6-9 months. When I first joined, I was heads down building our operational foundation and creating core functions (account management, partnerships, finance.) But as we asked ourselves what’s next after corporate cards, I found myself gravitating towards product incubation across new spaces—travel, ramp plus, accounts payable, lending, procurement, treasury, products for vendors etc.

Today, I oversee a third of the tech team, spanning our money movement platform, financial products like Ramp Treasury, internationalization efforts, monetization efforts, and AI/data initiatives. I also head our product marketing org. But titles only tell part of the story—what matters is how we think about building products.

Finding your Next Big Bet

Your recent tweet on what made you want to double down on Treasury bet was a masterclass in design thinking. It got a lot of love. Where do you get your ideas of what to build?

There's no shortage of advice, but I think that what resonates was how we pay attention to our users. New product ideas are literally all around you, as long as you’re deeply embedded in how your customers work and engage with your product.?

In this case, we noticed companies adding treasury managers to approval workflows, and these folks were doing all sorts of manual work—parking cash separately, pulling AP aging reports into Excel, logging into bank portals to shuffle money around – all so they could optimize their company’s cash. When we saw this, it seemed obvious to double down: build the ability to store money on Ramp, earn a market-leading rate on it, and wrap it into our workflows? Suddenly you've given back hours every week to these teams.

That's fascinating. When you're exploring these opportunities, how do you decide which ones to prioritize?

Focus on complements, not substitutes. Your first instinct could be "Oh, you're a corporate card startup? Get a banking license!"?

Sure, that's a fine strategy. We see lots of companies doing that– going deeper into the card stack. But for us, the bigger opportunity was different and closer to where customers had pain. Instead of becoming a bank, we mapped out our customers' entire economic loop: from capital allocation, to budgeting, to spend orchestration, to payment methods, to reconciliation, all the way to reporting. By thinking this way, we identified 5+ product opportunities with the potential to change the course of our business.

Once you spot these, how do you think about scaling them into actual products?

This is what I call thinking in multiplayer mode, not single player. Most companies build for a single user—for example, the person managing the corporate card program. But enterprise software is inherently multiplayer.

Ramp sits in the finance suite and is touched by everyone at the company. Think about it: every financial decision in a company involves multiple stakeholders. AP clerks need to process invoices, treasury managers need to manage cash, accountants need to close the books, budget owners need to approve spend, and employees need to make purchases. When you start thinking about these interactions, you've suddenly gone from solving one person's problems to building a platform and building products for those specific end users.?

That's when it gets really interesting. And that's much harder for competitors to replicate than just another financial product.

Organizing your business for the Next Big Bet

What you’re calling out in some way is the need to try and experiment. Sometimes though, new ideas don’t work. How do you approach this??

A lot of it is Ramp’s culture. We’ve been intentional about it. That said, there is bad advice around "don't challenge what's working" that even we aren’t immune from. Take Ramp Plus for example—when we decided to roll out an advanced tier of software and charge for it, there was this internal narrative that it would hurt our growth engine. Our model up to that point was based on free software, and it was working great.

But when we actually talked to users, we found something wild: almost everyone was convinced they were already paying for it. They thought something this good couldn’t be free! The hard part wasn't convincing customers, it was convincing our own team that we need to do this. And yeah, that conversation took longer than building the thing. Now, Ramp Plus has incredible traction, beyond what we could’ve estimated among both new and existing customers, so it was a good bet.?

But how do you roll out new products without disrupting the core business?

When startups struggle with rolling out a new business, it’s usually more operational issues. This is where you can unintentionally kill the golden goose. If the new bet isn’t organized well, it can really mess things up.

Organizing your business around a new bet is just as much a craft as building the product itself. That is to say, getting two engineers, one designer, and one PM to build something great is less than half the battle. Your growth team is optimizing CAC against core product benchmarks and your sales org’s incentives are to sell what’s working. You can't just throw a new product in there and expect things to work.

This is where tiger teams come in:a dedicated squad of engineers, designers, PMs, and go-to-market folks solely focused on validating the core hypotheses of the new bet. We brought procurement to market thisway:. until theres product-market fit, keep the broader org out of it.?

Essentially you're treating each new product like a startup within a startup where the PM is a mini “CEO”

In a way, yes. The key is giving them real ownership.?

The PM should be fully accountable for reaching product-market fit. This may sound? obvious but it's often overlooked —especially in high-velocity environments. In a growing organization, there can be tendency to point fingers when things don’t go right— “oh it was a distribution or marketing problem”—and the key is to hire people who don't give into that.

Here’s an example. When we launched Ramp Bill Pay, we saw a lot of self-serve product uptake but weren’t seeing the same results with sales.?

Rather than conclude that sales “just isn’t selling this right,” we went into truth-seeking mode and spent hundreds of hours with customers and the sales team to figure out where the disconnect was. What we learned was fascinating: our core hypothesis was right (no one wants separate tools for AP, corporate cards, and banking), and people found the product to be incredibly intuitive, but we hadn’t quite cracked a few key items that sales absolutely needed to sell.?

Once those were addressed, the product started flying off the shelf.

So when something is at scale, what happens at an organizational level??

We lean toward a functional model, where PMs and PMMs own specific product lines. Together, they act like GMs for their areas. I think there's a trend in tech to go back to functional models because it reinforces the craft of building great products—whether it’s a leader in product, design, or engineering. It happened at Block, aka Square recently too.

When building products, the most important thing is to prioritize customer value over? top-line metrics. At Ramp, we optimize for time saved for customers rather than strict ARR or AUM goals. A functional setup ensures the craft of product-building remains at the center of decision-making.

Building for Speed and Impact

Let’s shift gears. A lot has been said about Ramp incredible velocity in shipping not only product improvements but entire product lines and business lines—how do you do it so quickly?

Deadlines work. Period.

There's this notion that you shouldn't enforce deadlines, just "let builders build." I think that’s nonsense. Deadlines, especially ones set by the builders themselves, create momentum.?

In fintech especially where you’re almost always working with external partners, clear deadlines become even more crucial to create mutual accountability. We tell partners: "We're putting serious resources behind this, let’s move at the speed of the fastest common denominator."

What qualities make someone great at launching new products?

The number one thing I look for is a sense of agency—that you’re terrifyingly in charge of your own destiny. It’s these people who have a "stop me if you can" mentality about getting their products into customers' hands.?

For product development specifically, I look for people who intuitively understand that product development isn't about navigating three separate mazes of business, design, and technology. The really really great ones excel at all three.

And finally something specific to Ramp's culture, we're all allergic to process theater. The focus is on optimizing the value-added-to-words-spoken ratio. For example, if you’ve been speaking for 90 seconds, and you still are yet to make your point, it’s more likely that you're doing it for having yourself an audience and not for the job itself.

Do you have a favorite interview question?

'What’s the hardest job you’ve ever had?'?