Growing together: 2022 year in review
This last year at O/M was transformational in more ways than one.
In 2022, we built and revealed our company’s mission, a north-star statement for how we want to work with our people and our clients to prompt positive change in the world.
We are committed to creating a world that is accessible and beneficial to all by using design as a tool for bettering people’s lives.
Being part of a design firm has many benefits — a variety of projects to pursue, the ability to work with many different kinds of people through those projects, and the opportunity to be nimble as an organization and adopt new practices quickly.
One of the key downsides of working for creative agencies is that they frequently don’t have a compelling mission of their own. They’re often temporarily adopting the mission of their clients while partnering with those organizations. In these cases, the default mission of a creative agency often becomes “Do the best work possible for our clients,” which is a noble effort but can sometimes fail to be inspiring or fulfilling.
We wanted to craft a purpose that could extend far beyond our organization and ideally impact our clients as well as the design industry over time. One that is inspiring, fulfilling, and that gives us a reason to get out of bed in the morning. A purpose that doesn’t shift with the tides of each project but that can add value to every client we partner with.
In Q1 of 2022, we shared this statement publicly with the world and began applying it to the way we work. We crafted a series of principles and a guiding statement that now act as a compass for us. We’ve made significant progress towards bringing our commitments to inclusive design to life, but we’re even more excited about what we’ll learn in the future and what that means for how our design work impacts our clients, the products we’re creating together, and the world around us.
Building our team
In 2022, in an effort to empower our mission and better serve our clients, we doubled the size of our company. We expanded the design team and tripled the size of our PM team. We also hired a new People Ops Coordinator to help us care for our expanded team so that they can do the best work of their lives at O/M.
In addition to growing our team, we invested in our collective product design expertise through workshops, book clubs, sponsored events, and our study hall program that provides a space for our team to develop new concepts and skills as a group. We expanded our user research program, supported two employee resources groups, and hosted two in-person retreats in San Francisco and upstate New York.
We also partnered with the Queer Design Club as a headline sponsor for their first annual QDC Summit and gave a portion of our profits to support Dent Education, a non-profit organization in Baltimore that promotes equity by empowering under-resourced youth to discover and develop their innate creative potential to shape the world around them. If you’re interested in joining our support of Dent and their programs, you can check out donation opportunities here.
Helping our clients grow
We were honored to partner with an abundance of incredible clients this year. In 2022 we worked with Asana, Airbnb, Volkswagen, Hinge Health, Stripe, Google, and Grasshopper. While we can’t recap every project here, we’d love to share a few highlights from the past year to celebrate and ring in 2023 together.
Airbnb Ambassador Tools
This last year, we partnered with Airbnb to design a tool to support their customer service representatives, called Ambassadors, to help them effectively triage and solve customer issues. While Airbnb was already doing a stellar job of caring for its hosts and their guests, our goal was to provide accessibility improvements and workflow optimizations so that Ambassadors could continually advance Airbnb’s goal of providing the best travel experience possible to its customers.
Volkswagen Driver Dashboard
Volkswagen is the largest automotive manufacturer in the world, and we were honored to partner with them this fall to tackle a variety of design challenges. We worked with their US-based design team to respond to driver and consumer report feedback and applied inclusive design principles to the solutions we explored together. We also developed a design system to help support future design efforts to ensure consistency and accelerate further creative explorations.
Hinge Health
We partnered with Hinge Health to design a new experience for patients in their network that helps those patients understand their fall risk potential and prevent life-changing injuries before they happen. We also engaged with Hinge Health to support their care teams in their effort to identify vital areas of care to support their mission to help people with chronic pain get their lives back on track.
Reflecting on an entire year in a few short paragraphs is an impossible task, especially as we collectively shake off the rippling effects of the pandemic and grapple with an uncertain economy. We are, however, grateful for an incredible past 12 months as we reflect on 2022. We’re grateful for our wildly talented team, for clients that are passionate and aligned with our values, and for the opportunity to create a world that is accessible and beneficial to all by using design as a tool for bettering people’s lives.
It’s an audacious mission, and we’re just getting started.
