Having won a scholarship offered by Bridge Budapest, Fruzsi is spending the next 6 months working as a junior marketing manager at Synetiq, gaining practical experience and inspiration from one of the most innovative, promising startups founded in Hungary. This is the story of her first few months at Synetiq.
The business idea taken up by Synetiq’s co-founders Dávid and Ádám fascinated me from the first moment. Having passed all the stages of the Bridge Budapest application process, I interviewed with Kata, head of Business Operations and David, the CEO (and my future mentor). During the interview I was tested both on technical skills and culture fit. Seven new team members participated in an onboarding workshop a few days after I was hired, where we were all introduced to life at Synetiq. Expressions like “Slack”, “Asana”, “OKR”, “SCRUM” were flying around in the room. I was really excited to soak up knowledge about this ever developing, carefully configured system that ensured that the team’s efficiency is maximised.
Onboarding workshop in the meeting room
The company structure is based on three functions in order to maintain efficiency and productivity. The Engineering function, the Client Services function and the Business Operations function are led by one function lead each. David, Synetiq’s co-founder is guiding the three functions towards success while keeping the team happy. One would rarely feel the authority that comes with the title of “function lead”, we operate like a team, rather than a hierarchy. Within these smaller units goals and key results are clearly defined. Everyone in the team knows where we are heading and focuses on activities that make those happen. This is especially true since the OKR (objectives and key results) system was introduced in the beginning of November. All functions within the company have very clearly defined goals, and everyone is focusing 100% of their energy to reach these results until the end of the quarter.
The quarterly feedback ensures that each team member sets aside some time to reflect on their own and on each others’ work. During these sessions one can give feedback to any of the team members anonymously – let that be good or bad. I found this a particularly useful practice because so often efficiency of a team decreases because of unvoiced conflicts or unresolved issues between two. It is also a great chance to receive, consider and integrate honest feedback into your daily work. A feedback session also includes a 1-on-1 mentoring with David, thinking about professional or personal areas that one would like to improve in. Team members draw up a couple of areas and the next three months are spent working on these. When the next feedback session is due, one can reflect on which of the individually set goals were reached and what else needs to be done to reach them. For me this quarterly routine meant an opportunity to work on a structured plan on what professional development I’d like to reach in the next few years.
Team building in Eger
Synetiq also encourages self-development in forms of courses and workshops. There is a fix budget set aside for each function that can be used for self-development of the function members. This budget can be used to go to conferences you’re interested in, purchase books, attend events or enroll into online courses, like our data scientist Dani did with a Goolge Cloud course. In addition to this, 10% of the employees’ work hours can be dedicated to self-development. We usually “selfdevelop” on Friday afternoons – completing online courses, reading educational books or reading up on website development tips & tricks.
Representing Synetiq at an industry event
As for my tasks in the first months, Synetiq started a social media marketing campaign on Facebook involving client testimonial videos. I was in charge of creating the short and concise versions of the longer client testimonials that go out to the media. While at the beginning I wasn’t sure what potential clients are looking for in a neuromarketing company, by the end of this project I soaked up a lot of knowledge about how our current clients think about Synetiq’s work and what kind of personas we’re targeting with the campaign. The campaign videos we put together were a big success and my work was acknowledged by the entire team. The next big challenge will be learning how to use Facebook AdManager, getting comfortable with managing the website and producing content for our future blog. Thanks to the team’s large network, I get to consult with 7digit’s Social Media Marketing experts before I dive into these tasks.
While this post is only a short introduction to what my life at Synetiq is like, it shows that we work hard and always aim to deliver the best results, keeping the team’s happiness top priority. In my first months here, I’ve built a good relationship with all the Synetiqians, I’ve worked with many of them, I’ve consulted marketing experts and learned a lot since I’m here. Soon it will be time for the quarterly feedback and I’m curious whether the team is as excited about me as I am about them. I’ll let you know in my next post.
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The article was written by Fruzsina Mezei, Bridge Budapest Fellow and Junior Marketing Manager at Synetiq. The original post appeared on the Bridge Budapest website in December 2017.
