2022 Was All About Empowerment

Empowerment & Em-”paw”-erment at Wolfpack Digital

A General View on 2022

The war in Ukraine, the “end” of the pandemic, and the tech market correction with the associated tech layoffs are three connected external elements that have made an impact in the world and more specifically to our region, to our industry, and to our business in 2022. Additionally, with health safety measures becoming more relaxed, we all got to enjoy more face-to-face time with our team, our clients and our community. The year is ending with the beginning of a recession which adds to the general spirit of uncertainty, but also of opportunity in everything related to digitalisation.

We are wrapping up this year really well 🙌 at Wolfpack Digital 🐺, and are feeling strong and positive about the future, while of course moving on to the new year with a focus on innovation and staying grounded.

Speaking of empowerment 💪, I believe our company’s power lies in:

• 🔥 being creative
• ⚖️ acknowledging our strengths & limitations honestly, and
• 🎋 always going for a sustainable business model and using our resources wisely, rather than focusing on rapid gains (or money from the future), ever since our beginnings.

This can only happen when we fully focus on creating value for our clients and our team, whom we’d like to thank for being with us in 2022, as we continued on our mission of bringing performance & beauty to the world through technology! 🙌🐺 We’ve also seen the following of this principle be fruitful for many tech businesses and founders around us whom we work with.

“Building powerful web and mobile apps start-to-end”, as our slogan says, encompasses this view.

A warm thank you 🙏 to our clients for choosing us this year and for continuing on their journey to bring meaningful tech innovation to the world, and to our entire team 💛 for their dedication, passion, and adaptiveness this year, which has truly been a special one when we look at both the journey and the results!

2022 Highlights

Here are a few highlights from 2022 and what we managed to achieve:

• 📣 We got some awesome mentions & recognitions for our work: We got featured in Tech Crunch at the beginning of the year, Bucharest Stock Exchange selected us this year in their top 50 Romanian companies in the “Made in Romania” project, and we made it to Clutch’s 100 list for Sustained Growth, as well as in the Clutch Top 1000 list (out of hundreds of thousands of companies)
• 📲💻 We worked on some amazing projects for our fantastic clients: the “No 7 Pro Derm” skin scanning app for Walgreens Boots Alliance developed together with FitSkin, the BrainCapture mobile healthtech app democratising access to EEG brain scans, or the exciting collaboration we started with Deezer from France are just a few of them
• ☘️ We’ve opened our Dublin branch this year and had coverage in the Irish Times
• ⚙️ We improved our delivery processes for web and mobile apps and made them more powerful yet adaptable
• 🥂 We had some fabulous internal events and got to welcome new colleagues to our team: we organized internships on mobile app development & QA, and our team had a sustainable growth this year — we reached 85+ wolves in our team 🐺 — , while we are happy to have almost the same team as at the beginning of the year.
• 🤲 We continued our involvement in the local, national & international community: by sponsorships & partnerships with Innovation Labs (it was the 5th year in a row), the Romanian Fencing Federation, Code4Romania, Techsylvania, supporting startups in the 2 Hackmasters hackathons at GITEX Dubai etc.
• 🏡 We hosted and participated to several on-site events and conferences: our own “Building Your App’s UI for 2023” mobile development meetup, hosting the “Lean Coffee” meetup for Agile enthusiasts, Techsylvania, IT Days, CES Las Vegas etc.
• 🎤 Public speaking & mentoring startups: I spoke to audiences of 400+ this year at IT Days and The Woman, spoke in Brussels in the Science|Business Annual Conference, and in some other interesting, smaller, yet very impactful events (InnoWave, Idei cu Spor, DevTalks); additionally my colleagues Dan, Victor, Cristi, and Adrian Florian took the online and physical stage several times this year, and actively mentored in programs/accelerators/hackatons.
• 🎓 Mentoring/jurying at hackathons and events organised by our forward-thinking tech universities in Cluj in the CSInnoHub program by UBB Cluj-Napoca, and for SAS UT-CN Cluj
• 🍃 Our green initiative: we adopted a green space in central Cluj for the next few years, we contributed to cleaning up the Somes river banks, and we are ending the year with a garments recycling action, while we invested in the ZeroWaste project focused on tracking food waste, and in Rowmania — an app for navigating the Danube river consciously.

Separately from Wolfpack Digital:

• 🌸 Women in Tech Cluj: While reaching 2000 members this year, in the community I co-founded almost 5 years ago we went back to face-to-face meetups and we had our 50th meetup celebration — the “Witches in Tech” anniversary Halloween edition was a blast
• 🤝 Transilvania IT Cluster: this year I continued my work as part of the Board of Directors and the Transilvania Digital Innovation Hub was finally formalised
• 🌍 I traveled a lot again: London, the UAE, Barbados & NYC were some of the destinations on my list this year.

Empowerment as 2022’s Theme

Going back to empowerment as the main theme for me and for our company in 2022, here are a few ingredients that made it so for us in the year that is ending:

• 💪 we focused on empowering people and empowering the leadership team even more to make their own plans & decisions; this meant giving up on control and trusting people’s judgement even more than before
• 🛫🛬 we continued to cultivate the curiosity & growth mindset even more to relate to both failure and success productively
• 👀 we encouraged seeing reality and the truth as it is, not as we’d like it to be, straight from the very beginning
• 🧩 we increasingly looked together at the big picture and at how each piece fits into the puzzle
• 🤩🧘‍ we continued embracing a youthful and curious mindset in terms of new ideas & experimentation, while keeping a mature outlook in decision-making
• 🤞🤓 we hoped for the best, yet prepared for the worst
• 🔥🐸 we did more of what one believes in to fuel that inner fire, combined with ‘eating-that-frog’ when necessary; working on overcoming one’s weaknesses is great, but focusing on one’s strengths is even more lucrative.

Last but not least:

My lesson for 2022 was that if you want your organisation to go beyond a certain level, you need to grow and overcome your limitations yourself, as a leader, and really work on improving yourself and your outlook! This is what is necessary to empower others, be it your leadership team or other people you are mentoring.

Somehow on a theoretical level I had always known this, but 2022 provided me with the context to experience it first-hand a lot.

I’d like to particularly thank our leadership team and my partner in business and life, Adrian Florian, for showing me in 2022 that they can sometimes do so much better than me in front of certain challenges & opportunities! It is truly humbling and inspiring to take that leap of faith, and see people’s potential bloom! Their growth in the past year has been impressive. 👏

What’s In Line for 2023

For the new year our plan is to continue to innovate in beautytech ,fintech, healthtech, IoT, transportation & education/entertainment, while growing sustainably! 🌳

Also, we are excited to be stepping into the new year with 45% women in our team!

Additionally, we are approaching our 8-year anniversary (in January 2023) as a company at Wolfpack Digital, which has a special symbolism: If you tilt your head the number “8” does look like the infinity symbol ♾️. This makes me think of what truly stays the same as we evolve and what immutable qualities define us as time goes by.

What is the essence of who we are and what we do, and what truly matters? What do we want our legacy to be? Those are also the things that create more value and allow us to build things sustainably. But more on that at another time.

Going forward, I wish you, and our entire team and all our clients and collaborators, a peaceful and grounded year 2023, when we all focus on what truly matters! 🥂🤗