The People Who Make WriftAI Better

A while back, Abdullah and I found ourselves talking about hiring. Not open roles, interviews, or job descriptions. Just the people we'd worked with over the last few years who had quietly made the WriftAI team at Sych better. 

At some point the conversation drifted towards a simple question: 

"What was it about them?" 

It wasn't where they'd worked. It wasn't what they'd studied. It wasn't even whether they'd done the exact job before. The more we talked, the more we realised we kept describing the same handful of behaviours. Different people. Different backgrounds. Surprisingly similar ways of working. 

This article is an attempt to write those patterns down. 

Action Bias 

Abdullah and I were discussing employer branding when we started with what seemed like a fairly simple idea: a blog. 

Ten minutes later we'd accidentally designed an entire content strategy. Podcasts. Video series. Hiring campaigns. Culture stories. Newsletters. Social content. The list kept growing, and so did our excitement. 

Then Abdullah interrupted the conversation. 

"Let's just do the first one." 

That was it. We started with the first thing we could actually ship. 

I've noticed that same instinct show up again and again at WriftAI. The people who have the biggest impact aren't necessarily the ones with the best ideas. They're the ones who feel uncomfortable leaving ideas on whiteboards. They'd rather put something imperfect into the real world and learn from it than spend another week making the plan perfect. 

Most things we ship start out smaller than we'd imagined. The first version is rarely the one we end up with, and that's fine. Once something exists, you can improve it. 

Root Cause Thinking

A customer reached out after running into what looked like a fairly ordinary bug. It wasn't anything dramatic. We could have patched it, replied to the customer, and moved on. Instead, someone on the WriftAI team asked whether we'd seen it before. We hadn't. So we started digging. 

What followed was one of those conversations where the original bug slowly stopped being the interesting part. We pulled in a few more people, traced it back through the product, and before long we were looking at an entirely different problem. The bug wasn't really the issue. It just happened to be where we found it. The fix went out that day. The bigger change took a little longer.

The bug is the tip. The root cause is what's underneath.

We ended up changing part of the way we worked so that the same class of issue was much harder to create in the first place. Looking back, that customer did us a favour. Without that conversation, we'd probably still have been treating the symptom instead of the cause. 

I've come to really value people who keep pulling on the thread. Getting something working again is useful. Understanding why it broke in the first place is usually more useful. 

Ownership Radius

I sat down one morning to work on hiring and somehow ended up building an automation that pulled candidate information into our hiring tracker. It certainly wasn't in my job description, but neither was manually copying data between half a dozen tools every day. 

It felt easier to solve the problem than keep working around it. We've found ourselves surrounded by people who are surprisingly comfortable doing work that isn't theirs. That's usually a good sign. 

The interesting problems rarely come with an owner attached. Someone has to notice the gap, pick it up, and move it forward. They are the people who see something getting stuck and instinctively try to unblock it, whether that's a process, a customer problem, a piece of work, or an asset sitting somewhere it shouldn't be. 

It's not about doing everyone else's job. It's about having a large enough ownership radius to recognise when something needs to move and being willing to help move it. 

Friction Hunters

Some people just can't stand unnecessary friction. I remember someone asking why we were updating the same information in three different places every time we opened a new role. 

Nobody really had an answer. It had started as a perfectly reasonable process, then over time another step had been added, then another, and eventually everyone had just accepted it as "the way we do things." 

So we changed it. The work itself took less than an hour. The time it saved was measured in weeks. We've come to call these people Friction Hunters. 

They're the people who notice the extra click, the unnecessary approval, or the process that nobody has questioned in months. More importantly, they're the people who usually do something about it.  

Intellectual Humility

We have a bias towards people who change their minds easily. This typically hints towards a genuine desire to find the best answer rather than defend the first one. People with strong intellectual humility tend to hold opinions lightly. They contribute ideas confidently, but they're equally comfortable abandoning them when someone presents a better argument. 

We've found that these people make better teammates. Discussions become shorter, decisions become faster, and the quality of thinking improves because nobody is trying to win. The conversation moves on as soon as a better idea appears. 

Clearly this isn't something that's exclusive to certain backgrounds or experiences. We've worked with people from all kinds of industries and career stages who naturally think this way. We expect everyone at WriftAI to care more about arriving at the best answer than proving they had it first. 

The Human Layer 

When enough people start thinking this way, culture stops being something you write down and starts becoming something you experience. 

The interesting thing is that very little of it shows up in dashboards, sprint boards, or weekly reports. It happens when someone shares context before they're asked. When a teammate notices someone is blocked and quietly jumps in. When people pick up conversations that aren't technically theirs because they know it'll help the team move faster. 

We've come to think of this as The Human Layer. 

Interestingly, it isn't built solely through shipping products together. Some of it is built during the conversations over lunch, the moments beyond shipping, the random discussions that have nothing to do with work. They rarely feel productive in the moment, but they have a habit of making the work itself much easier later. 

The best people I've worked with contribute far more than their individual output. They make the people around them better, and that has a way of compounding across the whole team. 

One More Thing 

There is one other thing worth mentioning. We didn't sit down one day and decide that these were the six things someone on the WriftAI team must have. Most of them became obvious only after we'd worked with people who had them. And this list will probably change. 

As WriftAI grows, we'll learn more about what makes people successful here. Some of these traits may become more important, others may matter less, and we'll probably discover a few we haven't thought about yet. We're still figuring out a lot of things as we go, including what we want WriftAI to look like as we grow. How we build at WriftAI is changing as we learn too. 

Building WriftAI

By now, it should be no surprise that we believe progress is mostly a people problem. Products evolve. Processes change. The way we work today will almost certainly look different a few years from now. The people who thrive here probably won't. 

None of these ideas are intended to be a checklist. We've worked with people from different countries, backgrounds, and stages of their careers, and great teammates rarely all look the same. These are simply the patterns we've found ourselves coming back to over and over again. 

If you read this and found yourself nodding along more often than disagreeing, there's a good chance you'd enjoy building WriftAI with us. Our Careers page is probably a good place to start.