Think From First Principles by Writing
Close the laptop, write the question at the top of a blank page, and answer it before Googling anything.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
For novel scalability problems few companies have solved, Charles refuses to pattern-match from past experience. His method: shut the laptop, take a sheet of paper, write the question as simply as possible at the top, and spend uninterrupted time thinking it through in writing. Reading makes you wiser but doesn't make you think better—doing the thinking does. Only after you've written your own answer do you go read and fine-tune.
Origin
Geoff Charles at Ramp, on how he tackled questions like how to scale decision-making, allocate headcount fairly, and decide when to double down versus pivot—problems with no playbook.
Core principles
- 01Don't pattern-match from past experience on genuinely novel problems—go back to fundamentals
- 02Reading makes you more wise but doesn't necessarily make you think better; the way to increase thinking capacity is to actually think
- 03Writing clearly is thinking clearly—if you can write it clearly you can think it through clearly
- 04Read after you've thought, not before—then you fine-tune your thinking and find new questions
How to run it
- 1
Isolate the question
Shut down your laptop, take a piece of paper, and write the single question as simply as possible at the top.
Pro tip Do it somewhere that doesn't feel like work—outside, doodling on paper—so deep thinking feels refreshing rather than draining.
- 2
Answer it from your own head first
Spend uninterrupted time working out the answer yourself before consulting any external source.
Watch out Don't try to Google the answer first—reaching for external answers short-circuits the thinking that actually builds your capacity.
- 3
Then read to fine-tune
Only after you've reached your own answer, go read—use it to refine your thinking and surface new questions to ask yourself.
- 4
Protect the block in advance
On Friday, look at the coming week, pick the top questions to think about, and block the calendar time—early mornings, late afternoons, or one day on the weekend when you're not in the critical path.
Pro tip Structure your role so you're never in the critical path of anything, which frees you to be unavailable for deep work; keep a real emergency channel (a phone number) for what truly can't wait.
In the wild
Starting from first principles rather than industry benchmarks, Ramp treated every support ticket as a failure of the product, had support report into product, and incentivized agents to decrease tickets rather than just resolve them.
→ An extremely low contact rate: over 400,000 users served by a support team of under 30 agents.
Charles arrived expecting to apply his 'best' product development process, but it was predicated on a B+ engineering team. Facing an A+ team, he went back to first principles on how product should be built.
→ He shifted the entire process rather than copy-pasting his prior playbook.
Common mistakes
Pattern-matching from a past company
Saying 'I've seen this before at company XYZ' is an anti-pattern that no one wants to hear and that fails when your business is genuinely unique—it substitutes borrowed answers for real thinking.
Reading before thinking
Going to books or Google first makes you wiser but doesn't build thinking capacity; you end up with someone else's framing instead of your own reasoned answer. Think first, read second.
Is it for you?
Best for
Leaders and PMs facing novel, high-stakes problems with no established playbook.
Not ideal for
Well-solved, commodity problems where a proven best-practice already exists and reinventing wastes time.
From the transcript
“shut down your laptop yeah take out a piece of paper write the question as simply as possible at the top of the paper and…”
“I don't think that reading makes you necessarily think better it makes you more wise but the best way to to increase your capacity to…”
“you don't pattern match from your past experience but you go back to the fundamentals of what we're trying to do”
“every support ticket is a failure of our product”
From the episode
Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time
Geoff Charles (VP of Product)