What we achieved in 2017, and how it laid the ground for this year

The year 2017 was all about growth; as individuals, teams and business. We also had our office refurbished which has made working and hanging out at the office even more enjoyable. In sales we focused on sharpening our internal practices and how to serve our customers better, and created better practices to make these work better. We had long discussions about our focus areas, how we identify ourselves in the market, what sets us apart from other companies and what our direction and strategy are.

All in all, last year was a pretty busy year for us all. We worked a lot, developed a lot and celebrated a lot. Now we feel that many vital things are in place, and in 2018 we can concentrate more on building on top of the ground we laid last year. It’ll be an exciting year for Qvik, and it’ll be great to share it with Qvikies and with our customers!

Here is a recap of our most interesting internal topics of 2017.

Jari approves.

Impact through design

Last year we talked a lot about impact and how to create it systematically, i.e. how our work shows in the customer’s business. For example, our customer Aurinkomatkat achieved 60% better conversion with the new web booking flow and and increase of hundreds of euros on their average purchase.

Meanwhile, our work with Tallink Silja continued and we got to report that they increased their mobile revenue by 800% in two years.

Furthermore, we got to be part of the massively interesting Apple Pay release in the Nordics with our customer St1. And of course, impact is not just about cold financial metrics or new business openings – the constantly improving user satisfaction is just as important to us.

Celebrating a defeat at Qvik summer day’s competition.

New offering: cloud, AI and data science

In addition to supporting our customers in mobile and working strongly in, e.g., finance, media and travel industry related projects, we started to grow our cloud business. If last year tells anything about the coming one, our data analytics, data maturity, machine learning and cloud backend projects have been just the beginning. Working for our clients in, for example, the healthcare, finance or media sectors, has given us valuable insights and discussions to continue from.

One interesting case was Yle Areena machine learning project in which we transcribed videos and radio programs, embedded the text and distilled the keywords for better searchability on the website. As the Nordic Google Cloud Platform training partner, we also trained roughly 3000 developers in Google’s Cloud OnBoards held in Helsinki, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm and Tallinn.

Jerry in Copenhagen’s Google Cloud OnBoard, crowd goes wild.

Top talent finds us

2017 was also very good to us recruitment-wise. We hired almost 30 new team members: developers, designers and support staff. The focus was clearly in mobile and backend developers but we also grew our designer and support teams significantly. Despite the ongoing battle for skilled people in our field, we’ve been happy to notice that what we do as a company is very attractive to, not only developers and designers, but also other professionals.

Also all the 25+ meetups that we arrange annually and the ones we participate in, have given us an opportunity to meet a lot of extremely talented people in the Finnish tech community – and for those connections we are truly happy. Last year we also started to cooperate with many educational institutions in a more structured way, which has been inspiring, and given us opportunities to hire stellar young talents.

Eeva working at Qvik summer day’s workshop.

Making Qvik even better place to work

Last year we also lost people which was a big disappointment for us as an employer and community. However, something good came out of the exits as well: we realized the need to listen to our Qvikies even more and support their growth by offering things they found important and motivating. After a lot of sweat and long hours of facilitating discussions on different topics, we now have many practices, such as clubs, guilds and coaching, in place that have clearly contributed to the wellbeing, motivation and professional development of our team members.

Mammals at Qvik’s Company Animal Friday, CAF.

To summarize all this, in 2018, Qvik will be stronger than ever!

Ps. The pics on this post are from our last year’s events and trips. If you like what you see, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to get more of that good stuff.