How We Cut Process and Drove Growth at Synthesia

By Jake Gillespie
Engineering Lead at Synthesia
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At Synthesia, we try to keep processes to an absolute minimum. That includes meetings, project management ceremonies, standups, and deadlines. We only have one meeting a week—a 15-minute sync on Monday afternoons—and we’re thinking about cutting it because it’s redundant.

The values behind our low process culture

  • Ownership: We assign ICs a huge amount of responsibility, including testing, planning, and analysis.
  • Outcome-based effectiveness: We focus on impact and outcome above all else.
  • Peer-based collaboration: We don’t emphasize hierarchy between juniors and seniors.

How we deliver projects

1. Strategic alignment

Before we touch a line of code, we plan. We build a PRD (Product Requirements Document).

2. Project planning

We make a different tradeoff by fixing timelines and resources and leaving the scope of each project up to the engineers to determine.

3. Execution

Engineers publish three types of updates on a regular cadence:

  • Every day: Brief, async standups for other engineers and their team lead.
  • Every week: PPP (Plans, Progress, and Problems) update for PMs, designers, and leadership.
  • Every month: Workstream review to communicate major updates to company leadership.

How we hire for low process fit

1. Finding the right candidates

We focus almost exclusively on hiring engineers who already have deep technical experience.

2. Call with the hiring manager

We determine to what degree a given candidate is aware of project impact.

3. Technical interview

This interview focuses on impact and asks technical questions that inherently involve users and metrics.

Low culture prerequisites

  • Willingness to hire specifically: Hiring speed that can sometimes feel scary.
  • Strong product and product team: Low process and project ownership don’t work if ICs don’t have the opportunity to make an impact.
  • High engineer-engineer trust: Engineers need to trust each other.
  • Organizational buy-in: This is not a reactive way of working.

Startup = (Opinionated) Growth

In 1975, Fred Brooks taught us in The Mythical Man-Month that throwing more bodies at a problem will not solve it faster.