Also, something you could bring up to your partner, but one way we get around this is some custom cron scheduling for dynamic audiences and programs. As George mentioned, yes you can customize the program cron to allow it to run more often. In some cases we have taken the route of a custom program cron, same as the existing one, but made it so that we can execute it with a custom cron schedule via the CLI. This way we can target only program cron to execute more often, rather than the whole system cron. In addition to that, you can execute an enrol/cohort/cli script (and schedule with a custom cron job). This cron is what updates dynamic audience membership.

Naturally, as was mentioned, you want to keep performance in mind for running these crons more often. In my experience, the execution of program and cohort/dynamic-audience crons took a small enough amount of time that it seemed acceptable. With that said, scheduling these crons should take into consideration other crons and the master cron schedule, as it is best that they don't run at the same time.