Last month our annual #Kickoff2020 took place. The entire Empathy team gathered, together with –for first time ever– a selection of clients and partners, to celebrate our 2019 results and share our objectives for 2020. This year’s theme was Fueling for Growth.

Here are the main four takeaways:

1. Culture: People, Ethics and Values.

How will we create and maintain the best possible workspace? Forty people joined the offices in Asturias and Galicia in 2019, and in 2020 another 30 are set to join. Our growth is spectacular! Empathy’s new talent team will ensure that our core values – creativity, imagination, ownership and accountability – are well understood and adopted. We’ll also review onboarding processes, handbook, training, personal projects, and more. Innovation and team happiness come from having the best work conditions and culture.

2. Purpose: Why digital empathy matters

Now, more than ever, following these turbulent times caused by #covid19, people need to believe and trust each other. The relationship between brands and consumers has changed forever. We, as consumers, seek brands that have a positive impact in our lives, brands with whom we share common values. Brands need to be believed; they need to step up their game and demonstrate they can be trustworthy and genuine. The only way to do that is by being radically transparent and open. Say goodbye to the era of fear and surveillance, and hello to a new era of trust, transparency and digital empathy.

3. A snapshot of the new decade: 2020s

What are new data and tech trends telling us, and how will they guide our actions for the decade?

  • From personalizing a store for a user to letting a user personalize a brand for her. Digital identities, decentralized personal data and self-sovereignity, and the Internet of Things will have a dramatic impact on the way brands relate to consumers, and also on the relationship of organizations with vendors.
  • Brands have a new role as platforms of emotions, ethics and purpose.
  • Search, navigation and personalization are unifying into a single category of relevancy / access (data + experiences).
  • Smart components and enterprise multi-cloud environments are evolving into no-code experiences and a new, highly distributed and complex architecture of clouds – for example, user pod clouds and things-clouds. Our vision had our whole audience hooked and intrigued over the fast-evolving and exciting future ahead for us.

4. Product: 5 themes for 2020

Moving from product roadmaps to themes took the better part of Day 2.

  • Delivery & Efficiencies for Cloud: Introducing investments, growth and new tools and processes for Empathy’s Delivery team.
  • Build for Growth: Bring coherence to Cloud & Enterprise code-bases and tool-bases.
  • Enterprise Growth: Enterprise (multi-cloud) and large partnership for growth opportunities.
  • Mass-customized Digital Empathy: Interface purpose, components, extensions and innovations.
  • Motive (new product): Motive purpose, plan, resources and estimated deliverables.

Such an exciting year ahead of us! Let’s turn adversity into opportunity; let’s enjoy the upcoming challenges, and learn from them. There’s nothing more satisfying than coming out of a big wreck, a better human being.