2021 in review

Happy new year from all of us at Agiledrop! As another year comes to a close, we’d like to take a look back at some of our greatest accomplishments from last year that have kept us going through these uncertain times.

 

Marketing efforts

We kept advancing our well-developed marketing strategy in 2021. We published 84 pieces of content, of which 36 podcast episodes and 48 blog posts, and produced around 2000 social media posts. 

These efforts have proved to be very successful, as we saw a notable increase in inbound leads last year, which is likely a result of our strong commitment to branding and marketing. Big thanks to Tim, who is leading all of our marketing initiatives and making sure Agiledrop is a well known and respected company in the development community.

 

Sales success

Despite another year of no in-person meetings, our sales team was very busy in 2021, taking advantage of the accelerated digitalization and thus a greater need for businesses to undergo digital transformation. We signed scores of new contracts and extensions of existing collaborations..

Like every year, we were happy to sponsor both DrupalCon North America and DrupalCon Europe, but this year we also sponsored Acquia Engage as Bronze Level Acquia partners. In addition, we attended a number of online conferences, from more tech-oriented ones such as LaraCon and Gatsby Conf, to marketing-related events, e.g. B2B Online and Ecommerce Expo UK.

The most notable sales milestone of 2021 was definitely becoming part of a consortium that got a 6-year contract to work on the European Data Portal for the EU. There were also a lot of new JavaScript-only projects.

In Q4, another key change happened, with Ales Kohek becoming the Head of Client Services resulting from a shift in our management structure. Thanks to him and his teammates, Tomaz and Jure, we have surpassed our goals for 2021.

 

Financial wins

In terms of finances, 2021 was an immensely successful year, with a 44% growth compared to 2020. We have a stable financial situation, with several long-term or even multi-year contracts and diversified income from a varied list of clients. Here I need to thank Maja for all her excellent work as the newly appointed Head of Finances.

 

People and culture

Thanks to our success with new technologies and bigger projects, we increased our development capacity, with a focus on developers specializing in JavaScript and/or any of the top front-end frameworks.

Despite the pandemic, we managed to host three Drupal courses, one of them in partnership with the local technology learning initiative EESTEC. In addition to these, we hosted a PHP meetup in our offices after well over a year of keeping in-office events to a minimum.

As is tradition, we had numerous fun office-specific events, spicing up our AgileSports with activities like football golf and axe throwing, in addition to our already diverse AgileFoods. We also kept up with our AgileTalks, but we even took them up a notch with more dedicated AgileWorkshops – two of which were about VueJS, and one was focused on debugging PHP and Drupal.

Some of the highlights from 2021 were, like every year, the company-wide teambuilding activities, which this time ranged from an online beer tasting via Zoom, to the annual Agiledrop family picnic and even a two-day nature retreat with rafting and paintball.

We facilitated the day-to-day tasks of our resource managers by streamlining our internal Dashboard app, which was especially helpful for the European Data Portal project, our most challenging project so far from the point of view of internal project management.

The HR activities run very smoothly thanks to our new Head of HR, Nana. I need to also thank Lena for organizing so many events, both external and internal, during really strange and uncertain times. Of course, our resource managers Domen and Ivana are also hugely responsible for our operations running so smoothly, so, a big thank you to both of them.

 

Development(s)

There were a lot of interesting developments on the development side (pun intended, of course). We already mentioned the expansion of AgileTalks into workshops and the optimizations to our Dashboard app. Besides that, we upgraded all our sites to Drupal 9, and we grew our team of development mentors to improve the experience of new hires.

Since Drupal is in our genes (our team members scored 121 issue credits on drupal.org in 2021), the majority of our work still involved Drupal, but we also had a few Laravel-based projects, as well as an increase in the projects using one of the top front-end frameworks. This also included more decoupled projects with React and Gatsby.

Bostjan, our Development director and co-founder, has demonstrated tremendous leadership effort that is realized in how we can grow while keeping our core values and quality of work. 

I really need to thank him and his team of development managers and mentors (Janez, Benjamin, Nate and Tjasa) for all the hard work throughout the years. Here I of course need to extend my gratitude to our entire development team for being the heart and soul of what we do. Thank you for all your efforts and commitment that help make Agiledrop a respected and valued partner to our clients.

 

Plans for the year ahead

We have even bigger things planned for 2022. Firstly, growing our team, and opening a bigger office for our Maribor team where we also plan to start hosting meetups and other events once everything is set up.

Seeing the success and efficiency of our Dashboard app, we plan on building a custom internal communications app, based on the Open Social distribution for Drupal, to collect feedback from employees and allow them to easily register for events.

In line with our culture of learning and growth, we also plan on further streamlining our onboarding processes with more dedicated JavaScript as well as decoupled Drupal onboarding.

And, speaking of learning, this year we want to go beyond just the AgileTalks we’ve been successfully running for years now, and create longer courses around a specific technology where we can also go more into the nitty gritty of things, expanding the success of last year’s AgileWorkshops. We’ve dubbed this AgileAcademy.

Finally, to enhance the employee experience and growth of our developers, we’ll start doing more frequent and practically-oriented performance reviews, with more regular promotions based on latest improvements and more opportunities for developers to take their desired career path.

We’re very excited about what this year will bring. If there’s one thing we learned from the past two years, it’s that we need to be prepared for everything, planning for uncertainty but also hoping for some more of the old stability and consistency that we’ve by now almost forgotten about. 

May 2022 be a super successful year for you as well; all the best from the Agiledrop team!