SpaceUP: One Year in Orbit

We’ve officially passed the one year mark on our SpaceUP journey — and what a journey it’s been! Looking back over the last 12 months, it’s hard to sum up everything we’ve gone through in one post. We had our ups and downs, successes and redirections, and learned countless lessons. And we managed to reach the point we’re at thanks to all the support and hard work of all our colleagues.

Recently our Product and Engineering teams got together to celebrate the first year working under our SpaceUP methodology. When we met at Lipno last year to plan and officially launch SpaceUP, we knew things would look different one year down the line. But it’s easy to go about our days and miss out on the bigger picture and all the wins, big and small, we’ve had along the way.

We flew all our Product and Engineering teammates from around the world to Prague for a much deserved SpaceUP celebration and recognition ceremony. Of course we did it in style too, booking Prague’s planetarium for the event, no less. Hundreds of us seated in the planetarium, gazing up at the stars, we took a look back over the last 12 months together. Here are just a few of the proud moments we took a moment to celebrate.

Version 14

One of our biggest and most public accomplishments since the last SpaceUP offsite was revealing Version 14 at the Data People Summit in Boston this October. This new version represents a major shift in how we address customer and market needs, and we’ve already received some positive feedback from customers after the big reveal.

A few key improvements from the latest upgrade:

• Support of Teams, Federated Governance model through new permissions, collaboration features such as Comments, Data Stewardship, new business workflows and Task Management, as well as Reports catalog / integration with BI tools
• Significantly improved catalog and governance capabilities focus on data activation, as well as data compliance
• New data observability module allows monitoring of whole systems for anomalies in a fully-automated way
• Major integration with Snowflake, including native data processing on Snowflake
• ONE Data — for managing reference data in a user-friendly way
• Ataccama Cloud Portal — the new self-serve way of getting access to Ataccama products

We are also introducing a new Data Observability module, extending our strong DQ capabilities. And all this, in ONE single platform for Data Analytics & Governance. When we compare this with the Version 13 launch last March, we’re excited for what else is on the horizon for us.

Status Report

Last October we set a handful of clear goals to achieve with the new organization method: end-to-end ownership, empowered teams, speed of delivery, quality of delivery, flexibility and adoption of changes, disruptions and innovations, and celebrating our achievements. To reach these key milestones, we needed to hire 100 new crew members this last year. We grew from a Product and Engineering team of about 160 to roughly 300 members.

As Ataccama ONE GEN2 continues to grow, we readjusted our internal processes further to cover all our product and engineering needs. We started SpaceUP with seven Spaceports, and created two additional Spaceports to cover our ONE Data and ONE Portal offerings.

A crucial part of managing the SpaceUP methodology is our feedback process. We’ve had rounds of surveys sent to all Spaceport members at critical points of our methodology lifecycle to see how we’re actually doing, and if our people are able to achieve what they need to do. We took a look at the survey findings on the planetarium dome, one of the most positive being that 71% of our teammates enjoyed working in the SpaceUP methodology.

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

Each and every member of our teams played a massive role in our success, and we couldn’t have made these advances this last year without them. After celebrating all we achieved together in 2022, we recognized 20 Ataccamers who went above and beyond to support their Spaceports, and our goals as an organization.

Managers nominated teammates who they thought best represented those collective goals and the 20 were recognized on stage with applause and thoughtful praise for their individual contributions. Instead of certificates or impersonal gift vouchers, the winners received their very own Star Wars Lego sets. You’d be surprised how happy you can make our teammates with the right gift. :)

After all the presentations were finished and accolades shared, we continued the evening strong with dinner and a party. The photos speak for themselves — we ate, we drank, and we started the second year of SpaceUP with a bang.

Want to hop on board and join our SpaceUP journey? See what roles we’re hiring over at jobs.ataccama.com!

Hope to see you at our next anniversary celebration! 🚀