2022 was a big year for Shinydocs. We are especially proud of our award-nominated customer Dunedin City Council, renewals from all of our largest customers, and our addition of amazing new customers right up until the holiday break. We grew our team to well over 80 people and counting, received a $4 million investment from FedDev Ontario, and brought our product, marketing, and sales folks together for an in-person sales kick-off.
The focus for this year was setting the foundation that will make it easiest for customers to experience our team, strategy, and software. That meant hammering out operational excellence across our Customer Success, Product, Marketing, and Sales teams. We asked some of our senior leaders to share their reflections from the past year, how their teams have grown, and what made them feel most proud this year.
Jason Cassidy, CEO
What’s the biggest lesson your team learned this year?
The biggest lesson Shinydocs learned this year was to get ahead of market trends. The Great Resignation may not have affected us – we grew! – but it did affect our customers, and it was chaotic. We had to make sure we stayed consistently valuable to them and ensure that our customers could continue to receive value from our software, even if they didn’t have the time or resources in place to make the most of it.
What were some of your team’s biggest accomplishments this year?
Our success stories. When you have customers like Dunedin City Council becoming finalists in the Information and Records Management category at the 2022 ALGIM Awards or you have people like procurement managers bragging about our software or you hear from a customer employee we have never met that Shinydocs is having a positive impact on their work day, that’s a huge accomplishment. It’s mega powerful, because it’s unsolicited, and they have no reason to dress up the truth.
Another highlight is the maturity of the organization. Not long ago, when we made the pivot to our modern data approach, we were 18 people. Today, we’re at over 80 people and counting.
What are you most excited about for 2023?
Building velocity in a way that was never possible before. Our software scales up and it scales down both price-wise and complexity-wise. So what I’m most looking forward to in 2023 is shaving off any rough edges on our delivery, customer success, and product. Improving our go-to-market motion, and getting the team, the strategy, and the software in the hands of the customers easily. We don’t want to back up the truck and say, “Here’s your software. Go figure it out.” We want you to be able to experience our value with the team, with the strategy, and with the managed service, so you can see it grow.
Corinne Sharp, Chief Revenue and Growth Officer
What’s the biggest lesson your team learned this year?
That being an ally, sponsor, and mentor comes with great responsibility and that being authentic and leading with inspiration and aspiration shines through while being a role model to others.
What were some of your team’s biggest accomplishments this year?
In May, we hired a new cohort of fabulous sales professionals into Shinydocs with a myriad of experiences and customer-focused energy.
Is there anything else from 2022 that you’d like to highlight?
Being inducted into the Women in IT Channel Hall of Fame in August was a career highlight for me.
Davey Slimmon, VP, Customer Success
What’s the biggest lesson your team learned this year?
Resiliency. We went through a lot of growth as a company this year, and this was also true for our team. More than 60% of the Customer Success organization that we have today was not at Shinydocs in February 2022! There was a lot to learn and develop in a short period of time and the team showed incredible resiliency.
What were some of your team’s biggest accomplishments this year?
We delivered on our pledge to provide best-in-class service to our customers and were rewarded with a very strong NPS survey score from our customers, which indicates excellence in all areas of our technical product and services delivery. We also crossed over the 1 petabyte mark of customer data crawled, with no signs of slowing down.
Is there anything else from 2022 that you’d like to highlight?
In 2022, the Customer Success team focused on operational excellence and continuously delivered amazing results for our customers while simultaneously improving the backend systems and processes that will help Shinydocs scale and grow.
Khalid Merhi, VP, Research and Development
What’s the biggest lesson your team learned this year?
The biggest lesson we learned this year is the importance of being purposeful with your communication in a remote-first environment. Over communicate if you have to, but keep it to the point and respect people’s attention economy. It’s a muscle we had to flex over the past few years, and the results are incredible when the team gets behind it. We rely on good documentation and continue to transcribe that wealth of tribal knowledge and make it more accessible in our shared knowledge base.
What were some of your team’s biggest accomplishments this year?
The team continues to show incredible resilience. They coach and mentor each other, they support each other, and they continue to strive for excellence. They are empathetic, but hold each other accountable. As the company grows, maintaining that culture is paramount, but it won’t be without effort. We tripled in size and managed to hold on to a great culture so far and will continue to monitor and improve on that culture.
Is there anything else from 2022 that you’d like to highlight?
Our engineering leadership grew to include our incredible QA Manager Jen Cook, our unstoppable Software Development Manager Brent Wiens, and our prolific DevOps Manager Darryl McCutcheon. We feel we’re better equipped than ever before to handle the amazing road ahead of us and we couldn’t be more excited.
David Yoon, Director, Partner Programs
What’s the biggest lesson your team learned this year?
We’ve long worked loosely with partners at Shinydocs. In September, we officially created a position to take responsibility for it going forward. As Director of Partner Programs, I’m fortunate to work with our CRO who brings extensive experience bringing partner programs and was accountable for the $1 billion partner ecosystem for Microsoft Canada.
What were some of your team’s biggest accomplishments this year?
We’re continuing our ongoing relationship with OpenText, moving projects forward with our partners Alitek, Global Cents, and Joe Hill Consulting Engineers, working with Preolas based in Australia, and technology partners in the Netherlands. We’re having conversations with information management consultants like Steve Weissman and Ilona Koti and working to launch our program in earnest in 2023.
Shinydocs is growing. Interested in joining our team? Check out some of our open roles across Sales, Marketing, Product, and Customer Success.