While Spotify might have unwrapped my year in music (which still surprises me every year – I don’t recall listening to Willie Nelson THAT much), I wanted to wrap up our year at Rustici with a few highlights that made their mark on 2022.
We said many Hellos and a few Goodbyes
2022 brought a lot of new faces to Rustici – 12 new people in total. Many were planned new positions as we continue to grow, but we also had to backfill unexpected open positions as we weren’t immune to the Great Resignation. Any time you have a change, it’s disruptive, and I’m proud of how the teams here adapted to all of the shifts as we played some Tetris shuffling of teams and made room for the additions. Even with the disruption, we didn’t miss a beat. We kept on schedule for our product releases and even improved our customer delight score (99.8%!) compared to 2021.
We turned 20!
In 2022, we celebrated a huge milestone, hitting the 20 year mark as a business. We thought, what better way to celebrate than to dunk Mike and Tim? Note: TJ and I also took swims that day. Who would have thought we’d get a cold snap in March that made that dunk tank more of a cryo chamber? While we celebrated our 20th, we also turned it into a retirement party for Tim Martin who is now hard at work trying to get bored but has yet to do so.
We talked A LOT
Conferences came back in full swing in 2022, and we had the chance to present on various topics throughout the year. We had 7 live speaking sessions at various conferences and hosted 8 webinars. We got pedantic with xAPI verbs, compared the various standards, showed off the cmi5 course templates and mapped learning ecosystems. My favorite session was our co-presentation with Dan deBeaubian from SANS at DevLearn. Hearing Dan share the positive impact that Content Controller has had on their business and watching the audience nod enthusiastically was a reaffirmation that we’re targeting hard problems to solve when it comes to content distribution.
We gathered for our 1st customer summit
It only took us 20 years to finally host an event just for our customers after batting the idea around for a while. And we didn’t just dip a toe into this space but jumped right in hosting Rustici: The Gathering with a full agenda of 28 sessions across 3 days featuring a ton of Rustici speakers, customers and some of our friends in the industry.
We had a Thanksamazing Race
Thanksmas is our take on the office holiday party where we saw 5 teams tackle a series of challenges and detours, and we uncovered some hidden (and not so hidden) talents and identified the hard core gamers we have here at Rustici. We learned who the expert gingerbread house builder is (hint: if you’re ever in a competition, get Brian Miller on your team), we crowned a Pop-A-Shot champion (Ryan Pfeiffer nailed it and even went home with the Pop-A-Shot game which he’s since gifted back to the office), and we discovered that Dottie has some mad karaoke skills. Teams didn’t bat an eye at the ridiculous tasks we threw their way and even loosened up their pedantic-ness when it came to hashing out the rules. And a big shout out to our office manager, Liz, who transformed our office into a magical place to host the event.
Overall, it was a pretty jam packed year. But the reason these highlights rise to the top is because of how the people here at Rustici got involved. From building (and rebuilding teams) to joining in the fun of Thankmas and hosting our customer summit and sharing knowledge with our customers and the community, everyone here at Rustici participated and contributed in some way bringing their own personal style along with them.
