Last Friday, Letzgro held General Assembly to look back at the challenges and achievements of 2015 and set priorities for the coming year. This big gathering of all the teams, company management, advisors, and friends was organised to share the experience we gained working on various projects, tackling problems of different complexity, taking risks, supporting each other and doing our best to make our clients happy.
The Assembly was attended by Letzgro CEO Ihor Pidruchny who thanked everyone for their contributions and spoke about plans for the next year. He established the objective of adopting new diverse technologies and services. Ihor emphasised the importance of expanding the Ruby on Rails team, which has already delivered successful products and can now offer clients great solutions using this powerful technology. Also, our developers put in a lot of effort into mastering and applying such new tech as Erlang, Golang, Node JS, React JS etc. Then Ihor mentioned new services launched by Letzgro in 2015, namely, code review, setting up A/B tests and landing pages, and of course, digital marketing, which would ensure not only the quality of the code our developers write but also the successful release of the products we make. Another big step forward for us was creating Letzgro Engineering Incubator to help entrepreneurs launch their technical products on global markets through technical and marketing expertise merged in the right way.
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Cooperation with Aericon
Assembly participants enthusiastically welcomed Olga Moskal, a senior PM at Letzgro, who dwelt on the fruitful cooperation between Letzgro and Aericon, a digital marketing company located in Boston. She went over numerous projects we did together in 2015 and presented ambitious joint plans for the next year.
Developers Sharing their Experience
The event also provided an excellent opportunity for our developers to speak about the projects they worked on in 2015, new elegant hacks and plugins they came up with in the workflow and team cooperation challenges they had to meet.
Spletter App
Vitaliy Koziy, a full stack developer at Letzgro, talked about the allocation of resources when dealing with long term projects, like Spletter, an app for composing and sending physical letters with pics using your smartphone. Spletter is one of the products that bring value to people as it facilitates communication and brings us closer to each other, so everyone at Letzgro was truly eager to work on it.
Canadian Visa Project
Canadian Visa, one of our favourite projects in 2015, didn’t get a very smooth start but ended up as a success due to the right decisions made. Julian Ambroziak, an experienced full-stack developer who’d been working on this project, pointed out that at the beginning too much time was spent on discovery, clearing out all the details and other preliminary procedures. Eventually, the development team took the initiative and just started coding. The first results came real soon and, eventually, the project was delivered by the development team without the need to involve a PM or higher management.
Hadaf Videos
As Denys Galyk pointed out, when we first started working on Hadaf Videos website, the project had big and not very clear scope. In addition, the budget was limited and we realised that it was impossible to implement all the functionality within that timeframe. So, first of all, our task was to explain to the client what risks they might face unless more realistic and clear objectives are set. The website is on soft mode launch now and the client is happy because the team could make reasonable estimates of the project.
Code Review Service
Mary Mostova’s presentation addressed the challenges and opportunities her team faced while setting up code review service. Providing high-quality technical expertise has always been a top priority at Letzgro, so we decided to gather the best professionals in different technologies and engage some well-known code reviewers to ensure the best quality of the code our clients get.
Marketing
Letzgro Sales and Marketing team led by Ihor Pidruchny reported on their achievements in 2015. Our rather young marketing division has managed to set up the core digital marketing services: content marketing, SMM, event management, SEO, to name but a few. It’s worth mentioning that besides tangible results for Letzgro, we have also started marketing campaigns for some of our clients.
Jell Startup
Jell, a startup that we’ve been nurturing at Letzgro for quite a while now, has started showing promising results and acquired its first adopters and clients. Based on socionics, it can measure team chemistry and bring advice on improving the productivity of various working teams. We launched it in B2B and now helps tech companies perform better from the team metrics perspective. Alex Ovsianikov, Katherine Fihura, Paul Tsymbaliuk, the people who stand behind it, spoke about the research they’ve done and presented quantitative data gathered in the process.
Gratitude
We know that there’s still a lot of space for improvement for all of us, we remember all our ups and downs, all small and big failures. Yet in this short summary of our main event of the year we wanted to focus on the best things, as we believe that positive mindset and common goal is what keeps us going forward. We are really grateful to everyone who’s been going next to us all this year. We wouldn’t make it without every single one of you.
And the party afterwards… Well, it was legendary and brought us even closer together 🙂