It’s December, and for us, it’s that time of the year when we stop for a second to look back on what we’ve accomplished and make resolutions for the following year.
This year has been full of exciting opportunities and new challenges in Softia. We officially became a remote-first company, we had a lot of impressive technical achievements with our projects, and we grew our team with a lot of cool people.
We gave an end-of-the-year fun challenge to our colleagues in different teams and asked them to share some thoughts on 2021 at a glance. Take a look at our colleagues’ sincere thoughts and glimpse how 2021 was for Softia’s people.
Marketing team
As 2021 comes to an end, and we look back on it, this year has been an exciting adventure.
What we are most happy about in 2021 is that we attracted new people to the creative team and boosted our online presence.
Our biggest challenge this year was to find ways to engage people from within the organization in a fully remote way of working.
HR team
As 2021 comes to an end, and we look back on it, this year has been full of exciting challenges, but our team has made the most of it by being there for each other.
What we are most proud of in 2021 is that we succeeded in bringing new colleagues and building new project teams. We also experimented with new areas as human resources professionals by creating a company library with original content related to personal and professional development.
Although we extended our team in full pandemic times, we took the time to get to know each other and build strong relations.
One of our biggest challenges this year was recruiting nationally, building teams with remote-only colleagues, and rethinking how we have social events (Online Christmas Party, Softia Anniversary, and other monthly events like Softia Girls or Softia Forum).
Lead Analytics & Management Project (ILM)
In 2021 our team implemented new modern features to our application suite.
We started a challenge that consisted of rewriting one of our Lead Scoring Applications from scratch using the latest standards in the domain, which provides an incredible user experience. The reimplementation of the Lead Score application provided a boost to Lead Agents scoring effectiveness.
At the same time, we eliminated single points of failure, which translated to increased scalability of the previously not scalable features.
Our team managed to implement real-time sync with external services, which led to real-time data used by lead agents. Also, whenever the real-time sync implementation was not possible, we optimized and shortened the sync time by 60% while increasing the frequency of the daily syncs, which is now near-real-time sync.
We developed in-house solutions to reduce external costs with mobile calls, and that brought us flexibility and opened the possibility of faster implementations of new features for agents.
We are very proud that the team developed features that massively impacted the applications, and our implementation didn’t affect the agents’ work.
While working on all these fantastic features, team members got to know each other better, and after each iteration, they performed better and better in a remote environment. The team got through different maturity stages, translating into our average velocity, which gradually increased with each sprint.
Team spirit and morale were high this year – the team came up on its own with a practice to have daily jokes shared at the end of each stand-up which elevated the general mood of every team member. Whatever challenges we had, we overcame them as a team.
LAUNCH
As 2021 comes to an end, and we look back on it, this year has been challenging and exciting, but our team has made the most of it by working hard and aiming to improve as much as possible. We did this at an individual level and the team level by leveraging the experience and skillsets of all the members in an optimized way.
What we are most proud of in 2021 is that we delivered all the features that the business requested which in turn led to the team being praised on a consistent basis for the quantity and quality of work provided. We also started implementing application-level testing, which was a dream for the last three years, and each week we were able to increase the number of tests in the app by a small margin. The biggest challenge was to balance the number of features requested with the maintenance that we needed to execute on the app to provide a consistent application feel and a stable experience for all our user base.
Regarding the team, we are also proud to have introduced two new colleagues, which helped us increase the quality of the product and have access to a more diverse set of skills and experiences from which we could all learn and develop ourselves. We could say that, as a team, we always aimed to develop ourselves and improve our skills which always leads to improvements for the product.
This year, our biggest challenge was to shift our focus from one request to another even when the requests were overlapping in timing and requirements. Our most important quality as a team is our adaptability, and we have each other to thank for.
RP.COM
As 2021 comes to an end, and we look back on it, this year has been awesome, and our team has made the most of it by being committed to moving towards better and newer technologies in our project.
What we are most happy about in 2021 is that we managed to migrate our existing app to a single-page application that improves the development experience and the user experience by improving the loading time and the release speed.
Regarding the team, we are also proud we learned about swagger SDK generation and successfully implemented it on our new app.
Our biggest challenge this year was to shift towards a documentation first approach; this allowed us to ensure that the documentation is always up-to-date and then generate an SDK based on the documented endpoints.
AIRM Team
As 2021 comes to an end, and we look back on it, this year has been good in terms of collaboration with the team and mildly challenging in terms of technologies used. Our team has made the most of it by adapting to changes, working hard, having a good sense of humor, being committed.
We are most proud of/happy about 2021 because we solve many problems encountered in application reports that speed up this main issue: running all the microservice locally to develop the report.
We are also proud/happy that we made new friends and established strong relationships inside the team.
This year, our biggest challenge was to work efficiently as a remote team and identify innovative ways to keep the team engaged.
Onsite Team
As 2021 comes to an end, and we look back on it, this year has been good, challenging, and complex in terms of onboarding and getting familiarized with the project. Still, our team has made the most of it by having a good sense of humor and collaborating with colleagues and managers.
What we are most happy about in 2021 is that we started redesigning the online leasing application, solved the customer escalation without having any returned un-resolved issues for several applications, including the leasing product. We also updated the code base that improves the user experience and user interface for the online application. We increased customer satisfaction and confidence in the application and used the newest technical guidelines to increase the product’s maintainability.
Regarding the team, we are also happy that we could communicate well with different time zones.
Our biggest challenge this year was to get onboarded in a very complex leasing project with different modules and integrations.
UC
As 2021 comes to an end, and we look back on it, this year has been good to us, even if sometimes it felt like a roller-coaster. We had ups and downs, but our team has made the most of it by getting together for troubleshooting, brainstorming, and using a lot of jokes to blow off some steam.
On a technical level, we were able to implement a new Contact Centre solution without any support from the provider, further develop and update our services and develop a new chat virtual assistant called Smartbot that runs on NodeJS and uses DialogFLow CX.
We are proud that we grew stronger together when changes occurred and had new colleagues joining from inside the company and from outside Softia. Last but not least, even during a pandemic, we managed to keep a good spirit by meeting virtually and from time to time in person for team building or meetups.
If we could sum up this year in a few words, we would say complex projects, new colleagues, online onboarding, stronger teams. 🙂
We have big plans for next year, and we expect a fantastic 2022!
Here’s to the future!