A year in review: What was 2022 like for Point Jupiter
With almost a month and a half deep in 2023, I sat down to reflect on what 2022 was for Point Jupiter. I value these opportunities and want to make them a tradition—a moment to share some experiences and insights about our past experiences.
What a year, worthy of a year in review post
Last year, 2022, was quite a year for gathering those experiences. It was a year of repositioning, growth, innovation, and embracing what lies ahead of us as a team and company.
Rebranding – Point Jupiter 2.0
We started the year with our intention to rebrand Point Jupiter. And by rebranding, we meant all aspects of our brand and culture. Changing a logo is easy, but changing processes and culture is way more challenging.
We wanted our new brand to be more open, inviting, fresh and playful while, at the same time, it stays true to our values like professionalism.
Our rebranding process involved rolling out a lot of new brand assets. From our brand-new website, logo, business cards, document and presentation templates, emails, values, mission, vision, and tone of voice guidelines.
Our mission and vision are bolder than before, and we streamlined our values. We added some and removed others — the goal here was to be as authentic as possible and aspirational. We wanted to set some of those values as our higher ideals. And I know this is a process that will take some time, but we are all prepared for it.
I talked more about our new website and rebranding process in one of our earlier posts so you can learn more about it.
Remote-first company
During 2020 and 2021, we were a fully remote company owing to a COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns, and two devastating earthquakes in Croatia to make things even more challenging.
But we embraced these challenges as opportunities. We’ve been gradually adding more working-from-home days in the previous years. With earlier mentioned pandemics and earthquakes, these events pushed us into that new reality. And so we decided to take it all a step further.
Together with our rebranding and reimagining of our processes, we wanted to build a company that could be remote-first.
What does that mean? I wrote about that in one of our previous articles.
But as a key takeaway, it makes working from home not just experimental but natural and normal. And it also means that the management should envision all company processes and, where needed, re-engineer them to make them remote-first. And that’s what we did.
From simple things like ordering food and setting up an alarm system to more complex processes dealing with hiring, weekly meetings, personal development, career path discussions, and more, we re-engineered our ways of working.
The final result was a great success. Our people can now work from home, from the office, entirely remotely, or combine them. You don’t need to inform anyone about it — Point Jupiter wants to provide the best employee experience we can, regardless of your location. And this will set us up for even more growth in the coming years beyond the borders of our homeland.
Establishing new roles: HR and Business development
This year was a year of team growth. But our horizons are set 3–5+ years ahead.
Together with my co-founder and the entire team, we are looking for several years ahead. I’m constantly thinking about what Point Jupiter will be in 2025 or 2030. And I’m sure of two things — we will need to invest even more in our employees and teams, and we will need to find consistent and growing sources of revenues.
To achieve that, in 2022, we brought new people on board, and with their hiring, we established, for the first time, HR and Biz dev roles. Both of them are of strategic importance to our plans.
Human resources function
We are still a small company, and it has been asked whether it makes sense to have an HR function at a company of this size.
And the answer is yes.
Constantly finding new ways to make our people productive and satisfied and to enable their growth is one of our priorities. We also need to be on the lookout for new talent we’d like to hire. And you cannot do that with a part-time role. It requires a person that will make this their mission.
And Point Jupiter is realistic here. We are a growing company, and we have different resources than the company with 300 employees. But we are dedicated to observing and adjusting all parts of our HR processes. So much so that in 2023 we will make many changes and improvements in this area.
Business development
Together with HR, Business development is another new, strategic role we hired for in 2022 and established.
To fuel our future growth and to improve the quality of our project portfolio, we decided to create this position. A role responsible for our growth, establishing and building relationships with clients. Also, in charge of researching and seizing market opportunities, and ensuring our constant competitiveness.
Establishing new roles always means establishing and building new processes. And although we had some experience with business development, putting a person in that role to be dedicated to our growth was a unique experience for us.
I’m optimistic about what this will mean to Point Jupiter’s future, our development, and the development of our people and community.
The continued growth of our teams
We continued growing and strengthening our teams – sometimes in the form of new hires, sometimes by giving more autonomy and decision-making powers to teams and individuals.
In 2023 we will continue that process and establish much more straightforward objective-driven procedures and follow-up culture.
Naturally, we are constantly observing changing market opportunities. From inflation and growing cost of living to prospects of a recession in our target markets — we are spotting opportunities and adjusting to changes as they happen.
One of our key strengths is our flexibility. We had a chance to demonstrate that in 2020 and 2021. We materialized those lessons learned in what was a transformative year for us – 2022.
What lies ahead?
We will undoubtedly continue our never-ending company-building efforts.
In 2022 I started by establishing a top-level organizational framework. The idea was to better to align company objectives and key results of our teams. We started experimenting with OKRs (Objectives and Key results). In 2023 we will have those OKRs defined at a team level. This effort will allow us to focus our resources and efforts on those things that matter. It’ll help us stay aligned and productive, and I’m incredibly excited about the transformative potential this will have for us.
This year I want us to focus on two critical areas for us.
And I mentioned them earlier – human resources and business development.
We want the best possible hiring, onboarding, and employee development process for a company of our size. For example, regular, bi-annual follow-ups, establishing objective evaluation criteria, predictable salary adjustment processes, improved performance bonus structures, meaningful, targeted perks, and more.
From the business development perspective, we want to keep building and expanding our services portfolio. We will do so by building consistent, predictable, and growing project pipelines. Additionally, we will focus on projects delivering meaningful value to our clients and us as a team whenever possible.
Looking forward to 2023 year in review post
In 2022 we were consistent with our all-hands meetings, and I used the last one, in December, to outline some of the things I’m mentioning here.
And while some specifics are just for us as employees, what can be shared publicly is that we will focus on processes, efficiency, and growth.
We will also be more present and end our years-long self-imposed isolation. We started being more active on social media, posting a few more articles and attending more events. In 2023, expect to see more of us everywhere – online and offline. From more case studies and showcases of our success to more in-person events, conferences, and team outings.
Keep following our blog and our socials (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn), and I hope that one year from now, I’ll have another “A year in review” post for you.
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