Checkup time
It’s time for a half year checkup on how Polar Squad is doing.
It has been quite six months yet again; a lot of exciting new projects and customers, a lot of good new people, and a lot of effort to become even better as a company.
At the moment we are fully booked, which is a positive problem, of course. But it’s also quite a bit scary; we have huge possibilities open, how can we answer to those? Fortunately, we’re still constantly getting new awesome people in.
At the same time, our first customer survey gave us a net promoter score (NPS) of 100 (that is a perfect result if you were wondering), so our existing customers seem to be happy about our work and quite many of them would like to buy more from us.
With a headcount of 30+, we’re starting to be a credible sized organization also for the large customers. Growth has also allowed us to invest more in developing Polar Squad as an employer. We have started to investigate self-organizing organizations to help us stay flat while growing. The answer might be Teal or something else.
Despite our quite rapid growth, our weekly poll gives us an employee net promoter score (eNPS) of 96. That’s something that I’m personally really proud of and excited about. Of course, we’re not a perfect workplace, we know that, but we are constantly putting efforts to be better. We also had the first resignation, mostly because of reasons outside of Polar Squad. That’s how business works, and we have to accept it.
The biggest thing that has happened since the last update is that we finally moved to our own fancy office! And what an office it is! We moved in a couple of months ago, and the office is still missing a few final touches, but it already feels like home.
We are thankful for Wunderdog for lending their office. It was lovely in every way, but having our own is still something special!
Another big thing is that we doubled our back office at the beginning of 2019 by hiring Lasse Mäki to be our COO. Before joining the Squad, Lasse was running a DevOps unit with more than a hundred consultants, so the field is quite familiar to him. Lasse’s primary responsibility is quite simply to help everybody’s day-to-day life. Getting more administration doesn’t mean we have started to build hierarchy. No, we’re still a flat organization. Our back office vs consultants ratio is about 1 to 15, quite lean I’d say.
And what about our future?
Well, I guess we need to put a bit more effort into finding new members to the Squad. Mainly we’re looking people with Azure skills to Helsinki, and business development minded DevOps consultants to Berlin.
After summer there will also be some disruption in Tampere’s DevOps scene, as Tero Vepsäläinen will be the first of the Manse Squad. This might just be the single most significant event in the history of Tampere since the inventing of black sausage.
And we booked a trip to Spain for the whole company in the fall. It’s fantastic to get to spend a week with all the amazing colleagues and solve our customers’ problems together. I’m quite sure after that trip we’ll have a ton of killer ideas on how to improve. Perhaps we even get some meat on top of our Teal plans :)
Peace, Teemu
