Life At Syrup: Velocity, Customer Love, And Bowling At The Nashville Summit

You’re at your very first all-company Syrup Summit. Having heard that the last Summit was in Madrid a couple of quarters earlier, you’re not sure what to make of the honky tonk and flashing lights animating downtown Nashville. Velocity, supposedly, is the mantra of this gathering: a rallying cry to maintain the speed of development and innovation that brought Syrup this far.

So what’s one of the first things you do? Go bowling, of course.

I’m Tori, and I’m a Senior Data Engineer at Syrup. Fresh off the heels of my first-ever Summit, I wanted to share my thoughts about moving fast, working in a remote-first company, and the importance of fun in the face of improbable challenges.

Digging The Hole

Solving incredibly tough problems — like our mission to make commerce less wasteful — requires an investment of time, energy, and passion orders of magnitude larger than the average reader might expect. It’s a big reason why startup environments are so exhilarating.

The other, pretty stereotypical, reality about startups is that things move fast. And it’s no different here, by design. A simple way to explain it is by talking about one of our core values: dig the hole.

Say you know there’s gold under your feet. You might spend years consulting engineers, drawing up plans, conducting analyses…or, you know, you could just dig the hole.

Getting to great outcomes always requires a first step, and we challenge ourselves to take those steps daily. Every new project, every task, represents an opportunity for each employee to take ownership and move the team forward. 50+ people chipping away with their shovels is going to help get you closer to that gold much more quickly than you might think.

Anyway, I was talking about the Nashville Summit. Our guiding principle for the gathering, velocity, had a clear intention: get us to move fast! And it certainly succeeded, we absolutely crushed it in terms of productivity — but it also was a good reminder for me about the importance of knowing what environment is best for different types of work. Let me explain.

Ways Of Working In A Remote-First Company

My typical day consists of coding. A lot of coding. If you haven’t coded before, it’s the type of task that (for many people, including me) is most easily accomplished in a serene haven: quiet, distraction-free environments that nurture long periods of focus. Like, for example, my home office.

Full-company summits, as you might imagine, are a horrible environment for coding.

But they’re also the perfect environment for collaboration, planning, ideation…the very things that are more difficult to do through a computer screen. And that’s exactly what we did in Nashville.

Q4 planning was, naturally, a big focus. We have some really exciting product updates cooking that I won’t spoil here. Being in person helped us quickly identify high-impact plans, but only after some tough prioritization exercises. Having the space and environment to focus on this will pay dividends as we close out the year with a bang. We have a shared vision that we’re all invigorated to work towards.

Another big focus was customer love. We spent a full day splitting off into cross-functional teams with a singular goal: ship something that will deliver tangible improvement to our customers right now.

I loved partnering with people from different teams — sales, marketing, analytics — that I don’t usually have an opportunity to work with. And judging solely from the really creative, impactful work that made its way into the application, I’m willing to guess that the rest of the company felt the same way.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re having fun.

When Tech And Bowling Collide

Speaking of fun, I should probably finally talk about bowling. Being together in-person isn’t just good for getting stuff done. It’s also a great way to strengthen the social ties that make our team so great. And nothing gets bonding going more quickly than a bit of lighthearted competition. I’ll refrain from announcing my score, but let’s just say that my team and I came in first place.

Of course, being in Nashville, we were also treated to an array of amazing grub — and not just good for a bowling alley.

Fun and food are not sideshows at Summit. They’re part of the main event. Which makes sense if you think about when you’re at your most creative and energized. I’m betting it’s not when you’re locked away starving in a cubicle (metaphorically speaking).

And hey, if you’re looking for the perfect place for inspiration to strike, check out your local bowling alley. Or join the Syrup team. You’ll get the chance to solve tough challenges while having a blast.