Corporate Values: Incora Summary 2024

Traditionally, New Year’s Eve is a time for reflection. Therefore, we would like to summarize 2024 and discuss our experience and the lessons we’ve learned. Frankly, the last few years were difficult for the Ukrainian IT industry and brought a lot of challenges, but we managed to deal with them:

• When the russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine started on 24 February 2022, many companies had to deal with uncertainty, physical threats, and the need for relocations from the frontlines. However, this event affected Ukrainian developers and international investors, who outsourced their products to Ukraine.
• 2023 was a transition period during which both investors and Ukrainian development companies looked for ways to revive the previous cooperation pace and ensure its success. Companies also participated in volunteering activities, as can be seen in our 2023 retrospective.
• Finally, this year became a new starting point for many software teams, including Incora. Today, we want to discuss some of this year's most crucial aspects and events.

Eventually, in 2022, we relocated our employees and ensured the safety and efficiency of their working environment. Also, we predicted some of the challenges of 2023, getting prepared for potential blackouts and ensuring our clients are provided with the required software products, development pace, and software quality. As a result, we started 2024 prepared and ready for business growth and scaling.

Frankly, some of the challenges were tough, but we overcame each one and, based on our experience, prevented further issues.

Incora’s Business Trips and Scaling

As mentioned before, uncertainty impacted many investors. Therefore, one of our most critical challenges and tasks was to assure our partners of their investments’ safety. However, just like any other business, we aim to grow bigger.

Therefore, among our first steps in 2024 was to plan and execute a massive business trip that took almost half a year and included destinations in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Japan, and Denmark. Still, our trips to the US and Canada were among the most significant and productive.

Incora’s American Experience

Frankly, the United States is one of the most essential destinations for partnership. It is the most prominent IT market in the world. Besides, many American businesses rely highly on various software solutions and innovations, making them the most influential customers of outsourcing and software development companies.

Therefore, in 2024, our representatives have visited USA twice:

• In June, right after our trip to Canada.
• In October-November, visiting North Carolina, San Francisco, and New York, looking for cooperation and business meetings with our clients and potential partners.

First, we met our old partners and regular clients personally to discuss the process of our cooperation and the ideas and plans for the future. The second goal of such travel was to scale our business, contact new associates, and conquer new markets.

During the first trip, our team members visited Boston, Seattle, Houston, Miami, West Palm Beach, Lake Worth Beach, Doral, and even Hollywood for three weeks.

Apart from meeting old and new partners, we also visited IT conferences, local universities, and museums to fully experience and evaluate the perspectives of Ukraine-US cooperation in the IT sphere, what value we can bring, and what lessons we can learn from the United States experience.

Long story short, we are happy to work in the American market because it offers countless benefits, starting with more competitive salaries and ending with efficient knowledge-sharing practices and technological expertise.

Incora in Canada

Canada is among the most prospective destinations for Ukrainian technological companies due to a few factors:

1. Prioritized startups and innovations: The Canadian government offers excellent conditions for starting and supporting new innovative companies. One of the biggest challenges of such emerging businesses, though, is limited budget and expertise, which can be easily covered by outsourcing to Ukraine, which suggests a vast talent pool for a lower price.
2. NDA development and outsourcing: The Canadian IT market is popular and successful. However, many software companies still require support and team extension services to power up their projects. Thus, Canadian tech companies highly value Ukrainian outsourcing companies because they suggest excellent project security and data privacy, commonly working under NDAs.
3. Canadian-Ukrainian Relations: Finally, our countries partly share the history and culture. For instance, the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada is one of the largest. Besides, Canadians have shown great support for Ukraine after the Russian full-scale invasion, playing a significant role in resistance.

During this trip, we met our old and new clients. At Incora, we highly value personal approaches and meetings. This helps us establish friendly and open relations with our clients and discuss projects we work on in more detail.

Additionally, we used our opportunity to participate in local events like the Toronto FinTech Summit. Such conferences and summits help us learn more about market requirements and trends, establish new contacts, and learn new things. Our observations show that IT events slightly differ in each country, pointing out challenges and potential solutions for upcoming trends and tendencies.

Thus, we always visit as many such events as possible, trying to learn as much information as possible to provide our clients with the most innovative approaches and opinions on specific topics of interest.

Strategic Planning

Apart from setting contacts, this year also significantly changed our corporate life.

During our 2023 retrospective, we defined some pitfalls and identified business process mistakes. After clarifying and learning what can and should be improved in our company, we started implementing changes.

Judging from our experience, the best and most efficient way to ensure the success of such improvements and changes is to take smaller steps instead of implementing complex transformations. By dividing a global task into smaller assignments and processes, we managed to control each step independently and ensure high management efficiency.

One such small yet important step was to regularly practice strategic sessions when all corporate management gathers to discuss the progress of adjusting business operations and consider further plans.

Obviously, these sessions are not the only examples of our team gatherings and open discussions: each Incora team and department has its meetings, milestones, roadmaps, and deadlines. Besides, we maintain monthly management meetings to consider more urgent or ongoing plans and tasks.

On the other hand, strategic sessions speak for themselves and suggest defining complex and crucial strategic tasks and considering ways and best practices to achieve these ambitious goals.

Volunteering and Other Social Activities of the Incora Team

Eventually, business goals and trips were not the only events in 2024.

Our company traditionally continues volunteering, especially our fund, Incora for Ukraine. For instance, during our corporate party, we gathered over 150,000 UAH in just one hour!

Frankly, this is not the only charity donation. Still, most of our charity activities just happen without public coverage. Eventually, we do it not for self-promotion but to help people in need.

A Sound Mind in a Sound Body

In addition to continuing and scaling traditional practices related to business plans, volunteering, and charity, we decided to care more about our corporate values and our employees.

To do so, we started the Incora running club and celebrated its creation by running the Lviv 10-kilometer race. In just a month, we also ran 21 kilometers in the Ivano-Frankivsk half marathon.

Still, the running club is one of many opportunities for staying active with Incora. Hiking is another essential part of our healthy activities. For example, we decided to pay more attention to the team-building routine. From our experience, trips and adventures are among the most efficient ways to create a friendly environment for building a team and enhancing social interactions.

Therefore, we revived our traveling practices and started organizing weekend team-building events. One of the greatest gifts of being located in Lviv is the mountains nearby. So, our team has already conquered two peaks:

• As a whole company
• And a workation initiative by one of the departments

Yet, we plan to scale such activities and organize adventures more often, at least once in a few months.

Participation in Social Events and Conferences

Finally, we decided to increase our presence in the Ukrainian IT community. To be honest, we participated in every event we were interested in. However, we decided to increase our participation in such activities this year.

For illustration, instead of simply visiting events from KaizenHub, we became partners for some of the events.

Besides, this conference was a charity event, so organizers donated money to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This was an excellent event that changed the perspective slightly. Instead of analyzing and talking about successful cases, it suggested examining failures and mistakes to share the participants' experiences and learn about others’ mistakes to avoid them in the future.

Still, we also visited more traditional panel discussions and conferences like IT Arena and Lviv IT Cluster, where we had an opportunity to share our thoughts on the perspectives of the Ukrainian IT industry and discuss its opportunities with leaders of the Ukrainian IT market.

Long story short, 2024 was an important year for our Incora family. We had a lot on our minds, and we managed to deal with a few projects and embody some ideas. 2024 wasn’t easy, and 2025 promises to bring even more challenges. However, this year, we celebrated 9 years since the company was founded, and next year will be our 10th anniversary. Therefore, apart from challenges, we also have a lot of promising plans and ideas to fulfill and achievements to earn ahead, so stay tuned!