Orbit the Client

The (not-so) secret of agency success

It’s no secret in consulting that agency success is directly proportional to client success.

Meaning, a high-touch boutique agency, like Atwix, realizes value for ourselves only as a function of realizing value, first, for our client.

While this equation – “client success drives agency success” – is not really a secret, Atwix does utilize an approach which is certainly rare among eCommerce agencies.

The Atwix Offsite - Kemer Turkey

They say, “the greater the distance – the lesser the force of attraction.” (Sir Isaac Newton, I beg your pardon).  And here at Atwix, we used to have a pretty reliable formula for keeping remote teams “close.”

Each year – at least once a year – all Atwixers come together in one travel destination for a weekend of in-person connection, relaxation, and team-building. Welcome to the Atwix offsite.

Making-lemonade-out-of-lemons

Sometimes I ask myself, what defines a moment? What happens when the novelty of something that was “new” wears off and becomes customary? Many of us are probably already past the strategy of waiting out the crisis and have lost hope that we will wake up to find out that the last six months were nothing but a bad dream. Perhaps it’s worth dropping the “new” from the “new normal” now?

Atwix opens its Chicago office

Proximity has always been at the core of our Atwix culture. Of course, as a digital business building digital experiences for our clients worldwide, we have always focused on digital proximity—working very closely with our clients, partners, and community, being available and approachable.

Prepare a retrospective meeting

A retrospective meeting is an important part of the Agile Software Development. It does not matter whether your team uses Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall etc., or has no formalized management framework at all. It also doesn’t matter whether you have a formalized development sprint or not. What really important is to analyze your team’s progress, successes and mistakes, and then develop the team based on that information. The place and time for that is a retrospective meeting. Let’s find out how to prepare an awesome retrospective meeting.

Remote work from Asia

Usually you don’t jump on a plane with your friends and go to Asia to have some great weeks of living, working and traveling in the region. It was my first time of working from this far: a 6-hour time difference with our Ukrainian office, tropical climate and a whole bunch of other differences like food, traffic, religion etc.

Digital security in your company

What does 2018 have in store when it comes to security? Nothing very promising. The year has just begun and we already have some major security issues affecting Intel and AMD processors. The trend begins with WannaCry in 2017, latest issues with macOS and a whole bunch of different security breaches. And it will continue to persist as our society evolves and becomes more and more digital.

Organizing an offsite for a distributed company

Atwix is a distributed company. But once a year we break all our rules… Well, almost all :). For the whole year Atwix heroes work hard and from anywhere they want, except during one summer weekend when we all take a break together at the annual offsite meeting. This is an informal event that brings all our teammates, no matter where they are located, together for a long weekend – to spend time together and communicate face-to-face. Last year we had a pilot offsite, and since then we are committed to doing it annually.

This year, we wanted to improve our experience, and came up with some basic principles for holding a successful offsite.