TheyDo’s engineering playbook: The principles that power our team
)
Engineering isn’t just about writing code — it’s about solving meaningful problems, together. At TheyDo, our engineering team operates at the intersection of customer needs, technical excellence, and rapid innovation, building the foundations of a brand-new SaaS category: Journey Management.
And, since there’s no established playbook for what we do, we’ve created our own — shaped by our values, our customers, and our commitment to remote-first collaboration.
Our principles aren’t just words on a page; they’re the compass we use to move fast, build thoughtfully, and deliver enterprise-grade quality. Here’s how we make it happen:
A customer-first mindset
The most precious asset we have in our engineering team is focus time. To maximize that we've dedicated 70% of our week to focused engineering time, prioritizing understanding customer challenges, collaborating, and crafting solutions. Our engineers take full ownership of outcomes, shaping how we think, build, and innovate. Simply put — we practice what we enable our customers to do with TheyDo.
Speed & enterprise-grade quality
We’re proud to count over 100 of the world’s largest companies among our customers. Taking the enterprise path as a startup is unconventional, but it doesn’t mean a compromise between quality and speed. Through thoughtful engineering practices, we deliver enterprise-grade reliability with the agility of a startup, because our customers demand both.
Remote-first by design
Being remote-first from day one has allowed us to build a diverse, distributed team while giving people the flexibility to work in ways that suit them best. Our 'aligned autonomy' approach strikes the right balance—teams move fast while ensuring collaboration is structured and intentional.
These foundational beliefs shape how we approach engineering at TheyDo, but great culture doesn’t happen by chance. To keep us aligned and building our best, we’ve distilled our approach into a set of guiding engineering principles:
1. Keep it simple
Complexity is the enemy of growth. With every iteration, we strive to remove unnecessary clutter. #simplifytoaccelerate
Since we believe "the journey is the most powerful business tool," our product must seamlessly manage:
Diverse business processes
Large volumes of business data
The expectations of multiple personas
If not carefully controlled, these factors can quickly lead to unmanageable complexity — the kind that stalls a product (and a business), making it unusable, unmaintainable, and unchangeable.
That’s why we prioritize simplicity at every stage, ensuring both our product and the underlying technology are as simple as possible at every step — but that doesn’t mean it's easy. Distilling complex concepts into intuitive solutions requires a high level of clarity — something only achieved through continuous iteration.
There’s no shortcut to this, so we intentionally invest in simplicity, bit by bit, with everything we build.
Focus on a simple user experience
A simpler user experience = simpler to build and maintain.
As complexity grows linearly, the cost of change increases exponentially. That’s why we aim to simplify with every iteration.
Optimize for low cognitive load
What over how ⇒ Copying proven patterns and using “boring” technology isn’t just allowed — it’s encouraged. The real value lies in what we build with them.
Buy before build ⇒ Our energy is best spent on what we do best — that’s why we focus on our "magic sauce" and outsource the commodities that aren’t our core business.
2. Own your craft
You set the bar for both speed and quality — so you can raise it. #ownit #customerfueled
Great engineering isn’t just about writing code — it’s about crafting solutions that make a real difference for our customers. Pride in that craftsmanship is what makes the magic happen: code becomes clearer, systems become more reliable, and, most importantly, customers get better solutions.
Sure, we can high-five the achievement of building a successful product, but creating a foundation where great products are built consistently? That’s the next level we strive to achieve. We’re all about cultivating an engineering culture that drives long-term, repeatable success.
That’s why we intentionally invest in approaches, practices, and craftsmanship that enable this environment, and double down on:
Continuous delivery of small, incremental product improvements
High-quality software, evaluated from both the user’s and developer’s perspectives
Developer Experience (DevEx) as a catalyst for speed
Practice product engineering
Focus on the customer’s underlying need. In other words, if the customer wants a car (because they need to get from point A to point B), delivering a skateboard is better than giving them a wheel. Start small, iterate fast, and evolve solutions rather than over-engineering from the start.
Be an end-to-end stakeholder in the product. Consume customer insights, understand the value we deliver, and have an opinion on product and UX — not just engineering.
Think in systems. Look beyond individual feature requests to uncover platform opportunities and system-level solutions.
Release faster without sacrificing code. Slice product functionality strategically by asking: “Is there a smaller feature set that can be delivered in an impeccable state faster?”
Internal quality enables external quality
Optimize for clarity in code and interfaces rather than cleverness → Prioritize readability over rigid adherence to DRY principles or premature abstractions.
Great DevEx is the catalyst for high velocity → Focus on reducing the effort of maintenance rather than just the effort of implementation.
The product team owns quality and testing for their deliverables → The QA team is here to educate and maintain the testing framework, not to be the gatekeepers of quality.
Navigate technical debt strategically
Don’t let technical debt slow you down.
Don’t ask for permission to refactor → Small, regular refactoring beats—and even prevents — large rewrites
System health → just as important as building new features
Not all debt needs to be paid → some debt naturally expires
3. Enterprise-ready solutions
In enterprise SaaS, "it works on my machine" isn’t good enough. #customerfueled
Enterprise software isn’t just about features — it’s about trust. Our customers rely on TheyDo to power their most critical business processes, and a single outage or security incident can wipe out years of credibility in seconds.
The stakes are especially high because our customers:
Build their workflows around our platform
Trust us with their sensitive business data
Scale fast when they succeed
That’s why we don’t treat performance, security, and reliability as afterthoughts — they’re built into everything we do. Every engineer shares the responsibility of making sure TheyDo runs smoothly, securely, and at scale.
Performance, security and scalability come first
Definition of done:
It works
It’s easy to use
It performs at scale
It’s secure
We design for growth, testing with datasets 10x the current size to ensure our systems can handle the future — before it happens.
Reliable software goes beyond 99.999% uptime
Our software reliably does what it looks like it does.
We don’t just measure what happens on our servers — we track what happens on the customer’s machine, where it really matters.
4. Aligned autonomy
Alternate intentional collaboration with long chunks of deep work. #journeytogether
Engineering is a team sport that also demands intense individual focus. We don’t operate like a chaotic group of 7-year-olds, all chasing the ball at once. Instead, we work like a professional football team — small, organized groups moving the ball together with purpose.
The ability to seamlessly shift between deep, focused work and effective collaboration is mandatory — here’s why:
Complex problems require deep, uninterrupted thinking.
Knowledge sharing strengthens the entire team.
Written documentation scales better than tribal knowledge.
Autonomous decisions keep us moving fast.
Well-timed collaboration fuels breakthrough insights.
Autonomous decision-making
We like being on Santa Fe (meaning: we stay on track but can course-correct when needed).
Competence → Use your expertise, guided by principles, guardrails, and known patterns, to make decisions autonomously.
Clarity → Complex discussions and decisions are best documented in a long-lasting format — not just in Slack.
Protect your flow state
Focus on what matters.
It’s not just okay — it’s expected — that you protect your own focus time.
Deep work isn’t just solo time — pairing, teamwork sessions, and workshops are also forms of collaborative deep work.
AI is a collaboration tool too — use it to enhance, not replace, your thinking.
Learn and share deliberately.
Sharing helps at least two people learn: the presenter and the receiver.
Share learnings proactively — especially from failures.
Default to sharing in public channels rather than DMs or 1:1s to maximize impact.
Do Minimum Viable Documentation — just enough to be useful.
Beyond principles: Built for today, scaling for tomorrow
As a fast-growing startup serving some of the world’s largest enterprises, we know that success isn’t just about speed or scale, it’s about delivering what our customers need. That’s why our engineering principles aren’t just bullet points in a document — they guide our decisions and shape our collaboration while leaving room for creativity, innovation, and smart problem-solving. Codifying them ensures we stay true to what makes TheyDo engineering unique while evolving the engineering culture for the next stage of our product and company.
Of course, principles are just the starting point. We also maintain technical style guides and guardrails to enable as much autonomy as possible in making daily decisions while upholding the same quality, consistency, and best practices across our distributed team.
Want to see what this looks like in action? Check out A Week in the Life of an Engineering Team Lead for a behind-the-scenes look at how we work.
By prioritizing customer-driven innovation, balancing agility with enterprise-grade reliability, and embracing remote-first collaboration, we’re not just writing code — we’re building the future of Journey Management. And while there’s no established playbook for what we do, we’re proud to be writing our own.
Excited about what we’re building? Explore opportunities to join the team and help shape the future of TheyDo engineering.