A short summary of 2018 at Pragmatic Coders

End of the year and beginning of a new one is always a good moment for a short review of what we had achieved in the past 365 days. Our yearly company progress review actually already happened a little bit earlier – during our last company trip. But I believe that writing things down and sharing it here will also allow us to track our progress in the future.

In 2018 we matured a lot as a company. Not just by growing in numbers but also because of the number of processes we successfully introduced.

Happiness and satisfaction

The priority one for us has always been ensuring satisfaction and happiness to all of our co-workers. Last year we managed to introduce a few tools and processes around that. Now we have a more system level approach in place. A few things introduced this year by our team were:

• More structure in our flat organization – we distinguished four roles on the company level divided into projects focused roles: Scrum Master and Product Owner and organization focused: Account Managers, Servant Leaders.
• We summarized our company vision and put into a shape of Pragmatic Coders Manifesto – a guideline for every person in our company on what we value the most and why.
  In short words, we want to be a company that is a great and stable place to work and a place where everyone could grow. We want to work on interesting projects and this is why all of us are professionals who care about good relations with clients, think about business value and focus on continuous learning.
• We introduced a regular 1-on-1’s to collect and give feedback, supporting people growth and solving problem.
• Regular 360 evaluation for everyone, to help people grow and bolster teamwork.
• Monthly satisfaction survey to collect data and visualise our progress (or regress).

Read more about how we measure teams’ satisfaction here >>

All of the above was designed and performed by our #l-team – a small, cross-functional team of improvement agents who participate in our day to day company development. Creating this team and inviting our co-workers to participate in shaping our company was a crucial decision made last year.

2018 – a year of data at Pragmatic Coders

I could call 2018 at Pragmatic Coders a “year of data”. In previous years, as Co-CEO together with Marcin, we missed reliable data about our progress. Because of that, often we had to make a blind guess to make any decision. So we decided to start working on that and fixed it in 2018.

• We collected and built processes around a collection of HR data such as retention, company growth, etc.
• We put in place an automated process of collecting recruitment data. Now we track our recruitment efforts and measure all the recruitment sources.
• Data-driven recruitment process that allowed us to track and measure each recruitment process stage. Thanks to that we could better optimize our actions and focus on what matters.
• Wrapping things up, we started 2019 with a 45% growth in terms of the number of people Y2Y which I consider a quite good result and a reasonable growth pace.
• We also introduced our own financial data tracking tool to better measure our income and expenses as well as to make better forecasts for the future.
• Our sales process and sales funnel have been measured to. We learned a lot about our clients and their needs.

Continuous growth and the need for space

During 2018 a lot of awesome people joined our team and several others are joining us very soon in 2019. Also, a few new contracts with clients have been signed.

Domain focus instead of technology focus

Last year we also became more technology agnostic and more domain focused. More than half of our developers are proficient in 2+ programming language. Beside of our standard technology stack (Java, Solidity, Angular, React), we started projects in programming languages and frameworks that we have not thought about before, such as Go, Node.js, C#/.Net Core, C++.
(And still, we managed to avoid coding in PHP – even if we did some PHP code security audit :)).

This opened new possibilities of growth for our people as well as new opportunities for our business. Does it mean that if you want to join us you need to be fluent in a few languages? No, but if you are open-minded and not stuck with just one technology, there is a great chance for you to become a better programmer so your chances in our recruitment process increase.

New office in Warsaw

Last but not least, continuous growth requires more space. In December we managed to move into a bigger office in Warsaw. Now, besides the higher standard, we also have more room to grow our team. Check our job offers >> if you would like to have your own desk in an office with a nice view from the tenth floor of Prosta Tower.

We also have plans to grow in Kraków in 2019. Stay tuned for more news about that.

On behalf of the entire Pragmatic Coders team I would like to wish to all of you a Great and Pragmatic 2019!