Township 2022 in the Rearview
As we shut off the Township lights for a winter solstice, we’re taking a pause. Rather than 🫣 peeking back at the year, we’re doing a full 180 degree turn to soak in the view 🏔.
We always take the last week+ of the year off to give our team of Townies time for rejuvenation. Before we do, we’re reflecting on the efforts that went into another 354 days of good stuff with good people that produced good work.
Delivering on all that good required a lot of intentional growth. We’ve repeatedly correlated the health of our team with the health of our client partner relationships & project success—and this year was a banger.
Growing our people first.
New folks. The great work we bring our client partners always starts with a team of engaged Townies. Our people-first approach has led our culture from day one and this year it got us to the next level. We nearly doubled in size with eight amazing new folks joining engineering, design, project management, and people operations alongside two internal promotions.
More equitable transparency. We have more women represented in our leadership than ever (from 25% up to 57%) and we’ve closed the wage gap between genders. Yes, closed the wage gap. Stay tuned for a full report and ways to pursue this next year. Our most comprehensive and transparent compensation package ever was rolled out along with development opportunities to support junior talent advancement.
Feedback loops. Our client partners have shared how consistency and communication from a committed team make Township different—and we agree. We hold ourselves to the same standard internally and actively use feedback to keep iterating and evolving our virtual and in-person connections. While many companies struggled with the full transition to largely remote teams this year, we’ve always been distributed and further honed our practices. We held our biggest in-person retreat yet and gained some new friendly virtual battles through Dungeons & Dragons and our Tuneship Music League. We also refreshed our Township brand identity to better align with who we are today.
Building for client partner wins.
From the ground up. Our designers and engineers can attest to the significance of a solid foundation to build groundbreaking work on. This year we added more rigorous processes, a dedicated project management practice, and refined tooling to support our internal engineering development. This allows us to take on bigger, more complex projects and giving our clients confidence in the process.
Expanding expertise. 2022 was a leap year for us as we sharpened our use of React Native, creating cross-platform efficiencies. We continued our investment in Elixir and Phoenix by building products with great tools like Petal Pro, Oban and applying client requests to Teal, our soon-to-be open sourced admin dashboard for Phoenix. Pragmatic Design workshops allowed for cross-training where designers continued to refine their strategies for designing with engineering constraints in mind. This furthered our delivery of our cohesive design and engineering product development work.
Data. Data. Data. So what? This all resulted in output we’re proud to share and keep raising the bar on.
Our engineering team shipped 290% more work this year
We completed a whopping 1,896 Linear points
We decreased our time to first code review by 20%, while also increasing our code review coverage by 25%
We’ve delivered three connected-device mobile app projects we can’t wait to share with you next year
We worked on 15 sizable design projects and one big brand and visual identity re-design for Township
Our employees reported a net promoter score of 82
Wins to celebrate. Our collaborations with client partners resulted in some amazing work going out the door. We’re inspired every day by the brands and people we get to work with and can’t do them justice in a simple recap. You’ll see a lot more on these case studies in 2023, but here is a brief highlight reel:
We designed (and built) new features for the COVID School Data Hub⤤
that let users analyze more in-depth data per state
We continued to build on Velociti’s brand guidelines and brought them to life in a more dynamic way on their News and Press⤤ page and VeloCare⤤ site. Warning: do not spend too much time looking at this animation⤤
We partnered with elovee⤤ on their rebrand
We made data driven refinements to our long term partner, SquadLocker's⤤ website
We launched the Favor blog⤤ in all its glory!
We also have to shout out the amazing Shea Tate-Di Donna and Kaego Ogbechie Rust’s book The Venture Fund Blueprint⤤. It’s topping Amazon’s New Releases in Venture Capital list⤤ and is on our reading list.
More of that good growth.
So much accomplished and so much more to come. Like any solid recipe, we have some things cooking you won’t taste until the finished products are baked. For our part, that means launching multiple AI and mobile projects next year.
You’ll be seeing more from us, very literally. We’ve been working on packaging up and sharing more open source knowledge on our soon-to-be-less-secret sauce. Our goal has always been to create the spaces and products that fuel a world we can be proud of. Get ready for more of it!
For now, we wish you comfort and joy with your loved ones, your reflections, your peppermint mocha—whatever brings you warmth. We’ll see you fresh and ready to roll in January.
P.S. If support on product design, development, or brand is getting kicked to your back burner list until the new year—drop us a note and we’ll follow-up so you have one less thing on your list when you get back in action.
