2022 in review

Agiledrop Christmas party 2022 team photo
Company

The beginning of the new year is a time for both reflection and planning; so, in this post, I’d like to revisit Agiledrop’s most memorable and successful moments of 2022, as well as take a look ahead and tell you a little bit about what we have in store for this year.

 

Marketing & sales

The biggest wins for our 2022 marketing efforts came from our podcast: we published 33 episodes with more and more high-level guests, almost all of whom were contacting us to ask if they could join as guests. On top of that, we got great ratings on Apple Podcasts and got featured in several lists of top digital transformation podcasts.

Our client services team was keeping the entire team busy, onboarding satisfied clients in addition to procuring extensions and new engagements with our existing clients. We also successfully expanded into more JavaScript and Laravel specific projects in addition to Drupal.

One of the best things about 2022 for our marketing and sales was the heavily anticipated return of in-person conferences. We sponsored three – Drupal DevDays, DrupalCon US and DrupalCon EU – and attended many more, e.g. Acquia Engage in Miami and the Smart Country Convention in Berlin.

I really need to thank everyone who contributed to these wins: Tim for advancing our already streamlined marketing strategy; Aleš for leading the sales team and ensuring the top-notch quality of our client services; Jure for his contributions to our 2022 sales successes; and the two newest client advisors Andreja and Vuk for getting immediately involved in our sale processes and setting themselves up for success in 2023.

 

Finances & operations

Despite the economic uncertainties, our financial results were quite impressive, with a 14% growth in revenue compared to 2021. We remain profitable and stable, with a diversified income that doesn’t depend on a single client, market or technology, and several long-term and multi-year contracts.

We greatly streamlined our approach to internally managed projects, and we have plans for this to become a more prominent work model this year. We became even better at catching issues early on and thus managing incidents and risks. 

In the HR department, we also fully implemented the hybrid work model which is now even better supported by new features of our internal Dashboard app, such as electronic signatures and anonymous feedback.

Here I’d like to thank Domen, Ivana, Maja and Nana, who have all gone above and beyond in their work; all of them have been essential to our processes running like clockwork and to the constant improvements to our company’s efficiency and reliability, both to our clients and our employees.

 

People & activities

Although last year saw a lot of upheaval in the job market, we managed to grow our team to 81 full-time employees, and we even designed and moved to a brand new office for our Maribor team in March.

We introduced quite a few novelties to our internal activities, i.e. a new type of office event, AgileOff, which can be any kind of team activity – a theatre show, a boat trip, or anything in between (we did both of these and many more in 2022), and an office budget for each individual office whose members get to decide how to best spend it.

All in all, we organized 15 internal events, ranging from Drupal courses to AgileOff events, as well as the annual family picnic and Christmas dinner – after a long time without any Covid restrictions! Each of our offices got into a foosball frenzy table last year, and so foosball tournaments have become a regular feature of pretty much every team get-together.

In addition, we sponsored 2 local community events, a tech JobFair and the Dragonhack hackathon where our development director Bostjan also gave a talk about open-source software. Last but not least, we sponsored and hosted a Drupal meetup to celebrate the release of Drupal 10 in December.

A huge thanks to Lena, our event organizer and PR specialist, who not only made sure all of these events were running smoothly, but also kept improving the quality and frequency of all these events and ensuring everyone on the team had the opportunity to connect and engage with other team members. A big thanks also to the many other team members who helped with event organization and other office activities.

 

Agiledrop 2022 collage

 

Development

Of course, since Agiledrop is first and foremost a development company, the largest section of these yearly reviews is always dedicated to successes and developments on the development side, and this year is no exception. 

Like every year, we were busy hiring, conducting 52 technical interviews that ended up in new hires, almost a third of whom were JavaScript developers, which was quite a step up from previous years.

Three of the new developers actually joined after participating in one of our Drupal courses; we organized five of these in 2022, along with a more advanced PHP Masterclass course in May. Due to all the other activities, we only had one AgileTalk and no internal workshops – but we already have plans to revive and streamline these in 2023.

As I mentioned in the part about sales success, we increased the scope of JavaScript work (for example, we did an AngularJS to React migration) as well as improved our Laravel offering – we’ve noticed that it’s a very desired technology among developers, and so we’ll be preparing a proper onboarding in order to build a dedicated Laravel team.

Another big change for developers was the introduction of more frequent performance reviews – twice a year instead of annually – which I already wrote about as one of our major plans in last year’s review.

The lifting of Covid restrictions was very welcome for our developers as well, with quite a few of them making in-person visits to the clients they work with, as well as our clients visiting the Agiledrop offices in Ljubljana and Maribor.

Every developer on our team deserves high praise for their commitment and reliability which are vital to the great relationships we have with our clients – thank you all! A special thanks also goes to Janez, Benjamin, Nate and Tjasa for their dedication as development mentors, and of course to Bostjan for setting the example for the entire development department.

 

Plans and goals for 2023

Considering the current economic and social situation, our 2023 goals are more grounded rather than very lofty. The number one goal is thus making sure we remain in stable financial condition. Besides that, we have a number of small but key optimizations planned for our internal activities and processes, which include:

  • More strongly aligning our sales and marketing to further develop and optimize our brand strategy,
  • Attending and organizing more events, both courses and AgileOff-style events as well as technology conferences (e.g. Laracon),
  • Developing an internal tool to facilitate event organization,
  • Streamline onboarding and learning opportunities for Laravel development.

But the main reason why 2023 will be a big year for Agiledrop is that we’ll be celebrating our company’s 10th birthday in September. We don’t know yet exactly how we’ll mark the occasion, but it’ll have to be something big!

I hope 2023 turns out to be a great year for all of you reading right now as well. All of us at Agiledrop wish you a healthy and successful year filled with the most memorable experiences!