Doubling in size, bulking our expertise up, acquiring new clients, and becoming a part of the elite software engineering network – 2019 was a pretty good year for us.
Birthday party
Holidays are long over, we’re all at the office, so we had a chance to sit down and reflect on the previous year.
The year started with expanding our HR/Marketing department. New colleagues took the driver’s seat over hiring and onboarding new colleagues, employer branding, and marketing efforts towards clients. This department is now comprised of HR, marketing manager, and UI/UX designer.
The team helped with leveling up our internal processes, visual identity, and overall organization. They were also in charge of organizing various activities, such as team-building activities and parties.
Adrenalin park teambuilding
Karting teambuilding
During 2019 we felt a need to build a new department in the company – Quality Assurance. We started with hiring a Tech Lead Miloš Milić in this position, and he was a perfect fit. Our QA department now counts three people, and we’re still growing.
Two additional new roles were created during this year, SysAdmin and UI/UX designer.
A huge mark we hit this year is becoming a partner with Digital Knights. Digital Knights is an elite software engineering network, and according to stats, only 7% of companies meet the benchmarks to become approved partners. The due diligence process takes a few months, and every department, procedure, and report of the company is assessed and evaluated. The process starts with management screening, then team interviews, and ends with client satisfaction calls. Management vision, code quality, experience, satisfaction, retention, finance, everything is evaluated.
But it’s worth the effort, because, in the end, we’re standing hand-in-hand with the biggest and the most reputable companies in the world.
Last year we started a collaboration with our biggest client so far, one of the largest players in the cryptocurrency market. The team we formed for them started smaller, but in no time, our colleagues earned their trust, and we scaled up. So far, our team counts 17 people – software and QA engineers, a UI/UX designer, and a Scrum Master. We’re looking forward to scaling up this team even more during this year.
The team for one of the leaders in the cryptocurrency market
Expanding a list of benefits we offer was another thing we did – private health insurance was added. But, even thou the benefits are nice, we still consider that having colleagues with experience as ours is one of the biggest benefits of working at BrightMarbles.
And when it comes to growing in size, we employed 20 new colleagues, with medior and senior level of experience. The average overall experience stayed the same, 7+ years.
As for learning and knowledge sharing, one of the things we did was organizing a SCRUM training, and two of our colleagues – Radmila and Miloš became Certified Professional Scrum Masters. Learning and development are the fields we want to make further improvements this year, and we’ll work relentlessly to be even better this year.
As the year was coming to an end, our efforts were recognized in the industry, and we were contacted to participate in Machine Learning Hackathon, organized by Sandoz, a global leader in generic and biosimilar medicines.
Six of our colleagues skilled in machine learning, software, and business development, represented BrightMarbles. We were the most numerous team out there. Our colleagues were divided into three teams and enforced with Sandoz and Novartis experts in complementary fields.
In spite of fierce competition, one of BrightMarbles was amongst the winning teams. Their solution tackled the complex question of the drug market forecast. They offered concrete results that could improve planning related to the production and sales of generic drugs.
Cooperation and communication with Sandoz representatives are continuing to this day.
Sandoz Hackathon winners
2020 brought new goals, further growth of our client base, visibility on the local talent market, reinventing our evaluation and feedback process, and rebranding.
During the first quarter of 2020, our aim is to reinvent and rebrand BrightMarbles to match our growing talent and the new industry standards and trends. Starting from our logo to the website. Stay tuned to see the magic happen.
The other milestone we are about to achieve is the bigger working space. Since 2016 we’re in a working space with a capacity of 35 people, and at the end of the previous year, we outgrew our office. As of February 2020, we’re about to switch to another location and a bigger office.
And that would be it. 2019 was a “work hard, play hard” year for us, and we wouldn’t like it any other way. With this “trial” month (January) of 2020 coming to an end, we are ready to be better, stronger, and faster than ever.