Building Platforms to Support a Compound Startup at Rippling
summary
Rippling builds an opinionated platform called Rippling Unity centered on a single employee graph that unifies 30+ product SKUs so 600+ engineers avoid cross‑integration sprawl. Key layers are the object graph, an end‑user workflow layer, and a data/async/search layer. Reporting is platformed first (to avoid costly migrations), commenting is platformed later, and an applicant‑tracking product reuses permissions, approvals and dashboards. Adoption is measured by revenue contribution, internal surveys (quarterly 40‑question), usage metrics and support tickets; multi‑product orgs budget 30–50% of engineering to platform work.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Building Rippling's platform
- 1:52What Rippling is
- 3:182023 platform shift
- 5:23Rippling's platform layers
- 6:20When to platformize
- 8:24Gaining buy-in
- 10:11Platform features in ATS
- 12:00Scaling platform initiatives
- 14:50Measuring platform success
- 17:59Platform complexity
- 19:02Hiring for platforms
- 20:28Platform team benchmarks
- 21:12Dogfooding Rippling
- 21:55Balancing goals
- 23:19Platform investment indicators
- 23:59Defining features and team
- 25:45Assessing platform impact
- 26:27Future platform use cases
- 27:51Closing remarks
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