In this interview with digital services and IT professional services provider OPTiMO, we spoke with Michael Miguelez, Founder and CEO and Michael Wu, Vice President, Operations to hear their insights on the growing role of the CXO, ethics in practice and culture as a draw to retain and keep top talent.
User Experience from End-to-end
As a company focused on redesigning the user experience for agencies including USPS and DHS, OPTiMO is built upon the premises of people – of user research, iterations based on feedback, meeting client and end-user needs, and ensuring its team has the opportunity for an employee experience to match.
Founded in the same year the Apple iPhone was released, understanding how Government treated user experience at the time, OPTiMO moved into the market ready to marry what it took from both. “The iPhone really revolutionized the way people think about User Experience (UX), thinking about how different people interact. It would not have been the success it was had it been less easy or less intuitive.”
Tailoring its approach based on that, from the start OPTiMO understood the value of mobile, ensuring everything it developed worked on a variety of platforms. Its approach to UX came down to the smallest of details, testing anything and everything that the user would touch, interact with or have to interpret along their journey. “At the end of the day we want to take the customer from their drawing of what they want on a napkin to making it not only real but usable and a great customer experience. That takes becoming SMEs on each customer’s infrastructure to ensure we can deliver across its breadth.”
Growing Role of the CXO
While the role of CIO has been around for a long time, the role of the CXO is only now evolving and taking hold. OPTiMO sees the CXO as system owner, looking to them to understand their definition of success, knowing that the stakeholders the system has been designed for must be able to use it, be happy with it, and that it must make those lives easier.
“It can still be a challenge to make people understand they need to invest here, what with smaller budgets and tight timelines but when we can go in and figure out ahead what people want, rather than putting out fires after the fact when it doesn’t work the way they think it should, they, and our customer, are better off.”
As the CXO role across Government grows and leverages its need to ensure human experience is accounted for in technical solutions and processes, more agencies will come to understand their own role as a brand, which can be looked upon favorably because of its UX.
Culture as a Draw
Just shy of 100 employees, OPTiMO competes for its employee base with larger integrators. “There are other companies who can pay what we do, who may offer benefits that compare to what we offer, but our culture is a key differentiator that allows us to both attract and retain quality people.”
Noting many of its team have been with the company for a decade or more, these leaders say COVID was a trigger that forced many companies to show their true culture. Doubling down on its efforts, OPTiMO ensured it provided the flexibility, paid attention to mental health, and recognized that many of its team had taken on the triple hats of parent, employee and educator.
Work/Life Balance Emulated from the Top
As many companies shifted to at-home work, for many the lines of working hours and work communication blurred. “We understand that work/life balance is delicate. We want weekends to be a time away from work for everyone. We don’t want people having to work 16 hours to just keep up. While nowhere is it document that managers cannot email or communicate with their team on a weekend, they understand from our example that this is not the norm. The phrase family first, we have you covered has been and remains a common mantra.”
Leaning into what it calls emotional intelligence, into knowing how to lead people, recognizing their pain points, their challenges, and helping them through that, OPTiMO is focused on respect for work time and personal time across its management style. “We understand there are things that have to get done but most can wait. When we lead by example, it is easy for people across the organization to follow suit.”
Emotional Intelligence
That emotional intelligence has also been a catalyst for how and who the company hires. Being very aware of its culture, one that has evolved organically over time, there is a natural tendency to want to bring people in that are a fit, that share a similar mindset in caring about what they do. “Thou shall or shalt not doesn’t fit very well within our framework. Instead we tend towards collaboration, camaraderie, transparency and openness, knowing each of these will help the company and its team as a collective.”
That same emotional intelligence is still being applied to a return to office decision. “People still need flexibility. When we come together in the office for training or activities people love being there but we hear that they are not ready and we don’t want to force the team back to what it was before. No decision feels right at this time and we are happy to defer that until something becomes more clear.”
Selective Partnering
Remaining relatively small over its more than a decade in business, OPTiMO is very selective about who it will partner with. On every potential partner call, leadership is looking to understand a team’s CEO and what drives them, to better know what that team gets excited about, identifying a cultural match, and places it can provide genuine value. “We want to do a great job, to provide a great place for our employees to work, and where we can apply our techniques to support a successful outcome. When we can align all of this, revenue and growth will be a natural by-product. We would rather sacrifice velocity of growth for the sake of finding the right project with the right partner.”
Ethics in Practice
Saying they will turn down work that doesn’t feel right, that the team maintains integrity in how it presents itself, in the way it will bid and the teams it will bid with, comes down to a commitment to transparency and trust. “We don’t do a dance with partners. We prefer an inherent trust in who we are working with and for our side are clear about who we are and what we have to offer.”
Being clear about who it is and what it has to offer, OPTiMO has grown organically as a diverse team. Blind interviews, focusing on what people want and what they bring to the table, the team has evolved to include a good mix and a diverse team. “We have yet to put to paper any statement of who we have to be because we naturally reflect anything we might want to document.”
Giving Back
Proud of its slow and steady growth, knowing from where it came, OPTiMO is focused on giving back, supporting small school districts where funding may be needed, focusing on women and girls in rural communities, and organizations near where its team is engaged. “Every year we ask the employees who we should be supporting. We carve out a percentage annually for our employees and for the organizations that are important to them.”
Many members of the OPTiMO team also volunteer their own time within their communities. “Sometimes we know about it, other times we don’t because it is just part of who they are, part of what they do and have always done. It comes down to a way of living life. When we talk about attracting like minded people, that all fits into the family and community first culture embedded here.”
“The people here, this collective of people who have naturally come together, are what make OPTiMO what we are.”
About OPTiMO
OPTiMO is an IT services provider with areas of expertise spanning design and development, cloud, data, engineering and integration, and innovation solutions and research. Operating from the Washington DC Metropolitan area and Mid-Atlantic region, OPTiMO is a privately held, certified 8(a) small, disadvantaged business proudly serving US federal government agencies since 2008
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