AiSDR in the Fast Lane: A Sneak Peek at Our Workflow

Speed is everything in the start-up world.

How fast you grow, ship, and iterate separates the winners from the losers in the end. Especially for start-ups in the Go-To-Market category.

Here’s a quick look behind the scenes at how AiSDR reaches high velocity.

Weekly sprints

Our sprints are weekly. 

Not bi-weekly. Not monthly. Weekly.

And this applies to all teams: product development, quality assurance, marketing, customer success, and sales.

We organize our work into weekly sprints for several reasons:

• Rapid feedback loops – By delivering work in short cycles, teams can report or demo what they’ve done and get feedback quickly from team leaders (i.e. heads of each team) and any cross-team stakeholders. Getting feedback on Friday allows teams to incorporate feedback and get a running start on Monday when the new sprint begins.
• Focused effort – Weekly sprints are an easy way to set prioritization for the team and each team member. Since they have a clear goal, direction, and deadline, team members concentrate on the task at hand and avoid distractions.
• Greater agility – Our weekly sprints conveniently force us to be more flexible and divide huge projects into smaller parts that can be tackled within one week. And if we need to pivot or make adjustments because something’s not working, we can do so in the next sprint without derailing the entire project.
• Increased accountability – Friday deadlines are a useful incentive to get work done. That way you can close the sprint and enjoy the weekend stress-free. And if you regularly miss these deadlines, it’s an incentive for you to talk with the team leader about you being over capacity.

Overall, weekly sprints create a rhythm that helps AiSDR build and maintain velocity, iterate rapidly, and consistently deliver value to customers.

Sprint recaps

At the end of every sprint, our QA & development teams compile a report that we call “Shipped this week”. 

Then at the beginning of the next sprint, they share the update with the entire company to make sure that: (1) all teams are aligned as to product progress; (2) the Q&A and development teams receive recognition and props for the previous week’s work.

The reports contain:

• New features and functions (complete with screenshots and mini-demos)
• Expanded features
• Quality improvements
• Usability improvements
• Bug and UI copy fixes

And want in on a little secret?

These reports are an easy way to double down on encouraging accountability as no one wants to send (or receive) an empty report.

Monthly roadmaps

We don’t have a quarterly or annual roadmap. However, we do have a general outline of features we plan on adding over the next 12+ months, grouped by priority and difficulty. This comes in useful during sales demos when potential customers ask about features we haven’t launched yet.

Usually though, we just plan major monthly releases, like when we launched our Microsoft Outlook integration in April 2024 or AI videos and intent-based prospecting in July 2024.

The reason is simple.

We’re still in the early stage, and we want the flexibility to improve the product based on customer feedback. We’ve observed time and again that the “most important thing” for customers in April may not be the same in May.

Feature-centric roadmaps give us this ability to adapt or pivot fast.

Monthly contracts

The only true measure of your product-market fit is customer retention.

And if we’re being honest and upfront with ourselves, the only way to measure retention is to let customers leave as soon as they’re unhappy.

Imagine your pricing model relies on annual contracts that lock in customers for 12 months with no out. You might be bragging about huge revenue growth that first year, but if you haven’t gone through your first major renewal cycle, you might be in for a surprise.

Monthly contracts force us to be honest and realistic about our product. If AiSDR doesn’t deliver and customers start churning, we feel it fast and work even faster to make the AI SDR better.

Office work

Most of our team (including everyone on our development team) is based in the same city. Everyone is invited to do their work at the office, and the majority do so every day. 

There’s no work-from-office mandate, though visiting the office is encouraged for monthly 1:1s. And from time to time, visits may be required if there’s a critical meeting that’s best done in person.

The office itself is arranged in one large open co-working space, with tables arranged so that team members can sit together.

The value? More than once we’ve saved countless hours of research, development, and customer success thanks to a 30-second comment or explanation.

Simply put, in-office work works. But so does giving your team flexibility and trusting them to make the right decision.