How Sailthru Engineering Sets and Navigates Its Culture
This is our 7–word mantra: Think Big. Speak Up. Get It Done.
Hello, I’m Johnson, the ScrumMaster at Sailthru. If the engineers were a motley crew of shipmates, I’d be their navigator: charting the course to becoming truly Agile, iterating on processes, and helping everyone work together better and smarter. Another part of my job is nurturing the culture of our teams — how we approach our work, how we treat each other, and what we expect of ourselves. We follow a 7-word mantra to navigate the seas of change when it comes to our people, product, culture, and code.
Our days are filled with building the best marketing automation and personalization technology to help our customers create unique experiences for each of their users. At the same time, we’re vigilant about staying curious and aware of the broader context of everything we do, so we don’t lose sight of the forest through the trees.
Think Big means establishing metrics, analyzing the data, and then building out our technology and platform to scale reliably and efficiently with massive traffic and demand.
By the numbers, we have about 1.5 billion data-rich user profiles and billions more real-time events per month. We send over 6 billion emails every month for our 400+ customers.
Out of all this rich data, we realized that we could help our customers by making the analytics “smart” and actionable. Our big idea was to use the data to create predictions. We recently launched Sightlines, a first-of-its-kind algorithm that helps marketers predict the likelihood their customers will take specific actions, i.e. opting out in the next 7 days, purchasing at a set price point within the next 30 days, etc. To create these predictions, we built dozens of models across vastly differing datasets and business models. This generated over 1 billion predictions a day. With these predictions in hand, our customers are able to automatically create unique experiences for each of their users based on their past actions, and helping to nudge them toward future actions. This leads to increased pageviews and overall lifetime value of each user, which increases revenue for our customers.
In a later blog post, we’ll highlight the work of our SRE team to re-architect our entire personalization and delivery platform — creating a “stateless” system — that gets used across millions of profiles. We figured out how to personalize and send 7+ billion emails per month, with plenty of room to scale up and support 3x that volume within a short 6 month window.
Internally, Think Big means we nurture continuous growth and value learning new skills.
We set aside $1,500 annually, for every employee, starting from the day you join. This is what we call the Personal Growth Program.
This money isn’t taken out of your paycheck. This is money deliberately set aside for encouraging and helping you learn new skills. So whether you want to take cooking classes, get certified for your private pilot’s license, or brush up on your salsa-dancing moves — we help you get there. We do this to increase the diversity of the skills each one of us has in our toolbox, as you never know when you might learn something new that could unexpectedly help solve some of the interesting and challenging problems we work on, day in and day out.
Speak up means it’s OK to ask challenging questions about everything: processes, changes, and the rationale behind decisions. We have an open floor plan — no cubicles, no barriers between desks, no corner offices — which lets anyone talk to anyone. It’s also easy (and encouraged) to go shoulder-to-shoulder with our Customer Success teams to understand what they’re hearing from customers regarding what’s working and what’s not working on our platform. That in turn means that we can take that real-time feedback and incorporate that into upcoming sprints. This way, we’re not only iteratively building out new product features, but also being mindful of delivering optimal software and workflows for our customers.
Communication and the exchange of information becomes fluid and flat, and because you get feedback and answers quickly, you can get your work done faster.
We’re nerds at heart who love technology, but we also know that nothing is perfect, especially systems or processes. So our starting point is that there will always be faults. But we welcome them. Let’s identify the faults, then step up to the challenge of solving them. And solutions don’t only originate from the top downward; inspiration can strike from anyone, anywhere in the company. Only when people Speak Up and recognize faults, will others become aware of them, and then conversations can start around what can be done to address them.
Specifically for the engineering team, as part of our Scrum ceremonies, we have end-of-sprint Retrospectives. We deliberately make time to reflect on the sprint we just completed, and ask ourselves:
- What worked?
- What didn’t work?
- How can we improve?
One improvement we’ve made to the template is to put the “How to Improve” and “What Didn’t Work” sections side-by-side, so that for everything that didn’t work (that we want to stop doing moving forward), we immediately think about a matching action item for how to improve on it. We also @mention someone to become the owner of that action item to see it through and make it happen.
In this way, we inspect, adapt, and continuously iterate our processes so that sprint-by-sprint, we work smarter and build faster.
We’re a results based work environment. We don’t believe in clocking in and out, or face time for its own sake; some of our employees are even fully remote.
What matters the most is delivering the results you committed to.
Life can get busy and unpredictable — we get that, our lives are the same — so take care of what you need to take care of. Run those daytime errands, let in the dog walker, and get those pearly whites checked regularly. But be responsible enough so that you still deliver on the things you said you would. Your teammates and other stakeholders in the company are depending on you.
We take this idea a step further by having unlimited vacation days. The mutual understanding is that when we are here, we are present and engaged. We all work really hard to achieve the goals we set for ourselves and the company, so it’s fair to then take time off to unwind, travel, go on an adventure and learn something new.
We love hearing about tales of derring do and share in marveling at the world beyond our desks and devices.
Interpreted another way, we also see Get It Done as an opportunity to go above and beyond our prescribed responsibilities. If there’s something you think you can do to make someone else’s life easier and more successful — both internally for your teammates, but just as importantly, externally for our customers — rally the shipmates and make it happen. Many of us turn these into learning opportunities.
Here are a few things our engineers proactively took on and got done:
- A new hire saw a chance for increasing productivity and standardizing environments by creating Docker containers for sandbox
- Our SRE team noticed that a customer had a template with thousands of lines of conditional Zephyr syntax which caused inefficient execution in our system (think about all those conditionals being evaluated across millions of profiles). So they proactively reached out to the customer and offered examples of more efficient and effective syntax. This helped reduce load on the system while also making it easier for the customer to troubleshoot their own logic
- The QA team realized that they were manually generating a lot of data throughout testing, so they initiated their own team project to create a “data maker”, something that would help them generate all the data they needed automatically, on demand
Irrespective of title or department, we keep our 7-word mantra top of mind and close to heart. It drives us to cross-pollinate, share knowledge, teach and listen to each other so that we can get things done — allowing us to be more responsive to changes, increasing productivity, and ultimately, stepping outside our comfort zones and boundaries to always learn and grow.
In the coming posts, we’ll be covering topics like the technical details and engineering challenges behind our core systems, conduct interviews with individual engineers in our “Meet the Sailors” series, and share some of the tools and processes we use to work together smarter and build faster.
Come join our motley crew of coders, hackers, tinkerers and architects:
