Sailthru Values in Action
Though I only recently became a full-time Sailor, I have actually spent over a year working here in a few different roles. I have watched the company mature immensely through my previous roles– first as a summer intern in 2015 and then as a part-time engineer while I finished my computer science degree at Columbia. Having completed a few other internships during my undergraduate career, I expected that Sailthru would follow suit. One preconceived notion that I held was that there was a clear distinction between interns and the rest of the company. I thought interns usually could not touch production code and were given busywork. I expected that as long as I helped out with basic tasks, my coworkers would be satisfied, as it meant that they did not need to sacrifice their own work to teach me.
When I began at Sailthru, I was not entirely sure what it meant to be a software engineer. My past experiences led me to believe that I would constantly be overwhelmed by unfamiliar jargon and forced to attend regular meetings that did not make sense. I had worked in companies that claimed to use agile methodologies, though even after three years, I was not sure what that meant. I previously understood a company’s values as abstract concepts written by the CEO that everyday employees did not bother to follow.
On my first day as a Sailthru summer intern, all of my preconceived notions about a software company were reversed. My initial reaction was that my new coworkers actually cared about my personal and professional growth. At Sailthru, I see people directly embodying our values every day on every team. It doesn’t take long upon entering our SoHo office to start seeing examples of people sticking to our core values. Let me provide some examples of how I first saw and continue to see our values embodied on a daily basis.
Passion with Purpose
In a digital world, we believe that human connections matter more than ever. This guiding principle shapes the passion and enthusiasm we bring for our teams, our customers, and our shareholders.
At the heart of Sailthru is our desire to bring back personal connections to online marketing. In this age of tech, when many customer-to-brand interactions happen online, it is difficult to get a sense of the values a company upholds. We want to change this by making the interactions between our clients and their users more personal. Not only do we create human connections via our platform, but we use this mantra to recruit new hires. Everyone who interviews in our office goes through a culture fit interview. We try to imagine what it would be like to bounce ideas off one another around a whiteboard. We want to gauge if we could have a lively conversation with this person in our communal kitchen or at our coffee bar. Not only do we strive to hire people with the best technical skills, but we want people who are driven by passion, in and out of the office. We find these people by not just asking about their technical background, but by listening to interviewees talk about their favorite hobbies and weekend activities. By looking for new hires who share our passion and warm attitude, we have cultivated an ideal atmosphere that is encouraging, enlightening, and engaging.
Driven by Customer Success
We define Sailthru’s success by the value we create for our customers. Customer success drives our strategy, our decisions, and our investments.
Our standard of writing value-oriented user stories for all of our tickets is a prime example of the emphasis that Sailthru places on customer success. Whenever we create a new story for the backlog, we make sure that it is clear to everyone what tangible value the user gets from that story. In our bi-weekly sprint planning meetings, we discuss each story in detail to make sure everyone understands the value to the user. This process ensures that the engineering team is prioritizing their time with work that will directly benefit our clients’ Sailthru experience. That is why multiple times a day, when we deploy code, our customers can see noticeable improvements to the Sailthru platform.
Results Matter
We measure ourselves by what we accomplish, and how we convert our passion into impact. We recognize that getting things done requires collaboration, focus and execution.
We cultivate what is known as a Results Based Work Environment. This means that we emphasize employee performance over face time in the office. Our employees have the freedom to choose how to customize their schedules and working styles to maximize productivity. The goal is to improve accountability and autonomy as well as decrease response times. We do not judge how people spend their time and use clearly defined goals to measure success. These goals are set with managers at weekly one-on-one meetings, which provide a private time to discuss a wide range of personal and professional matters. While we do value regular group meetings, we understand how hard it can be to get work done when our days are swamped with them. For this reason, meetings are often optional and employees can call into them and multitask at their own discretion. We aim to hire responsible, independent workers, who we can trust to best manage their own time. We don’t bother with red tape here and allow our employees to follow their preferred working style to maximize their productivity.
Integrity and respect in all interactions
We are honest, fair and respectful in our behavior with fellow team members, clients, prospects, and partners. We act with integrity, only tolerating constructive engagement.
In our office, all voices are respected equally. No matter if I was an intern, part-time, or full-time, my opinions were equally valued at meetings. Even when senior leaders at the company were in the room, I never felt that I had to hold in my thoughts to let other more experienced people speak. As an intern, I was encouraged to challenge myself to my full potential. Within my first two weeks, I had already engaged in our entire development process– writing code, creating unit, integration, and quality assurance tests, presenting demos, and deploying production code. Right away, I gained a better understanding of the process of releasing high quality software. At every step of the way, my opinions were sought even by senior developers. At Sailthru, we value new perspectives and discussion over being right. As long as you are listening and engaged, it does not matter how silly an idea may seem. In the end, the more voices that speak up, the more likely we are to examine all angles of a problem to find a proper solution, avoiding unnecessary bugs and chaos.
Data to decide, courage to act
Decisions come from data. We seek to avoid confrontations of opinion, and instead use the best available data to make decisions. We must have the courage to act when data lead us to make difficult choices. But we must also have the openness to admit prior mistakes and learn from them.
In the center of our office, you can find huge screens full of live metrics of our system health. Our Site Reliability Engineers manage these dashboards and monitor them to prevent downtime and errors for our clients. Knowing the constantly increasing complexity of our system, we use these data to guide our day-to-day actions. Anytime we have problems with our system, we carefully document the causes of the problems and ways to prevent them. We are not ashamed to call each other out for mistakes. Our supportive work environment never seeks someone to blame. Instead, we use these moments to improve our understanding of the system and create processes to avoid mistakes. These same data analysis methods are employed by each sprint team. Each morning, we update the number of hours remaining on subtasks and track our progress on a burndown chart. We are quick to call out tickets that are at risk of falling behind. Rather than complain that a team member is not working as fast as we would like, we offer our extra time to help get tickets through the pipeline.
Grow, innovate and improve
We will always innovate, challenge the status quo, and take calculated risks to move forward. We push ourselves; we try new approaches, continuously learn, and explore.
Every two weeks on the last day of our sprint, each team gathers in a room for a sprint retrospective. We begin these meetings by having each team member provide a happiness score for the sprint and name one positive and one negative experience. Then we engage in a group discussion about what we did and did not do well, as well as what we can improve on for the next sprint. In my experiences at other companies who engaged in sprint retrospectives, these meetings seemed abstract and there was little follow up for actionable items. At Sailthru, we review the retrospective document from the previous sprint to make sure that we are constantly improving and learning from our challenges. Otherwise, this meeting would not actually improve our productivity. In addition, when evaluating a new ticket, we determine its level of difficulty by comparing it with past tickets of similar complexity. This strategy allows us to increase our velocity (the number of “story points” we complete every sprint) as we becomes more comfortable with the code base and with working as a team.
One Sailthru
We are one team that succeeds together, fails together and learns together. As One Sailthru we transcend the boundaries of geography, product, role and function, and operate as a single team, aligned for our customers’ success and the success of Sailthru.
This final Sailthru value really ties together every point I have been getting at– we are one big family. One of the reasons why we are so successful at coordinating inter- and intra-departmental tasks is that we are comfortable with one another. Our weekly Thursday catered lunches and evening happy hours provide a reserved time to get to know everyone in the office. Rather than only being comfortable asking for help from one’s own team, we are encouraged to be friendly with everyone at the office. This results in a noticeable improvement in productivity. At previous internships, I would spend hours stuck on a problem that I quickly realized I could not solve without help. At Sailthru, if I am stumped by a problem, I am not afraid to grab someone from any team if I need assistance. Our open office design–filled with communal desks and glass-walled meeting rooms– limits the time it takes to seek out a coworker. When I require help solving a problem, not only is the person I ask happy to assist, but they end up teaching me additional lessons about our system purely because they enjoy helping others. I look forward to coming into work every day, not just to learn new technologies, but to hang out with this giant group of caring and interesting people. As a twenty-something just beginning my professional life, I could not be more satisfied where I have ended up. Everyone at Sailthru knows how precious our culture is and we understand that cultivating these values is essential to maintaining this perfect balance of learning, teaching, and fun.
