These days, digital product development agency DockYard is busy designing and developing custom software, mobile, and web applications for innovative companies that are leading digital transformation. As one of the leading digital agencies in the United States, DockYard aims to set a high standard for engagement, efficiency, and elegance in the sophisticated user experiences they create.
DockYard’s services bring exceptional value to clients — a value that’s only increased over the years, thanks to an ability to deliver innovative user experiences across software, mobile applications, and web apps. The consulting firm attributes its success in part to the decision to create a distributed workforce that can recruit the best professional experts from anywhere in the country — whether New York, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, or Seattle. As well as to DockYard’s dedication to meaningful collaboration and communication — so the knowledge and expertise of consultants in terms of design, user experience, mobile development, and web development is readily available to clients.
DockYard employees remain in constant contact over messaging and cloud collaboration tools, encouraging the kind of coffee hour chats that might take place in a traditional office, in addition to daily conversations that impact projects and workflow. The company encourages constructive feedback, and takes employee satisfaction seriously. Its monthly employee surveys gauge happiness, identify areas of frustration, and determine collaboration best practices, helping DockYard to maintain a 90% satisfaction rate.
This collaboration model is equally important in terms of communication with clients across the broad range of industries DockYard serves — from information technology to healthcare to financial services and transportation. DockYard’s expert Project Managers lead client projects, making sure every stakeholder remains in the loop, and milestones are achieved like clockwork. As project ambassadors, they focus on creating full transparency across all goals and perspectives, and ensuring clients and team members have opportunities to review what worked well and what could be improved at every step.
“By fostering a highly collaborative and communicative environment, we’ve built a level of productivity that’s paramount in the mobile and web application development industry,” says Beverly Anderson, DockYard Director of Project Management.
Driven by passion and experience
DockYard aims to instill passion in its teams by motivating employees to continuously build leadership skills. The company’s flat management structure allows team leaders to rotate and share decision making.
Beyond client projects, DockYard also encourages employees to build inspiration and leadership skills by contributing their software, mobile, and web development expertise to the open source community. Towards this end, the company hosts DockYard Fridays, where consultants work on personal projects and initiatives that contribute to the open source community for technologies such as Progressive Web Applications, Ember, Elixir, and Phoenix.
“Each of us brings a unique perspective that contributes to our craft and growth as a company. DockYard respects and rewards our employees for varying experiences and skills,” says Thomas Atwood, DockYard Director of Marketing.
Phenomenal success and growth
DockYard’s rapid growth — almost tripling in one year — can be directly tied back to its success in recruiting top tier digital product strategists, designers, developers, and project managers, as well as it’s continued focus on fostering communication, collaboration, and a fun and rewarding work environment. Treating employees right has led to a stronger bottom line.
In terms of advice for upcoming software services executives, DockYard CEO, Brian Cardarella explains, “Luck is the key to success, however you must make more opportunities to get lucky. Persisting in the face of adversity until you get lucky is the difference between success and failure. If you believe in what you’re doing, don’t give up.”
