Pros
Most if not all the employees and managers are really good people whose hearts are in the right place. If we can fix some of the core problems, this company’s success has no limits. But can we pull this off before we lose all of our brightest and best?
Cons
1. The product is a serious mess. Company keeps pushing out new features without fully fixing the core product, even with customers ranting online asking them to stop. Leadership seems obsessed with growth at any cost, and won’t slow down to address their horrendously complex and “not user friendly” software that requires laughable workarounds and sad explanations to customers just to get it set up and useable. 2. WHERE IS THE DOCUMENTATION???? Why on earth is no one from product responsible for documenting exactly how to set this software up from beginning to end and/or to keep this documentation updated? Why did I not even know until my third customer that we have to set up sales tax, and then why couldn’t I find any complete and understandable documentation on HOW exactly to do that after I realized it needed to be done? My customers can’t even use our Knowledge Base because of how outdated or just completely incorrect/lacking in details it is. It’s absolutely inexcusable to have a software this complex and force your employees to hunt through outdated word documents and a mess of overlapping confluence pages and old slack conversations just to figure out how to do their jobs. 3. NTO is a complete joke and waste of time. You spend two weeks playing games and feeling good and learning what type of bird you are, and come out of it knowing almost absolutely nothing about your real job. You can’t hit the ground running because you haven’t learned anything useful, and you will quickly forget what bird you were when you’re pulling 14 hour shifts just trying to get through the day. 4. Finance team notorious for claiming understaffed teams are somehow fully staffed and making departments bend over backwards (and lose long-standing employees to burn out) before finally approving more roles…always too little too late. Why are we trapping ourselves in this toxic cycle? We know we are growing and yet we refuse to change from reactive to proactive in our staffing behaviors. Even the finance team itself is understaffed, with awful work-life balance admitted by the former manager. 5. It’s sickening the way this company glorifies the sales team at the expense of everyone else doing the heavy lifting. I know multiple people in customer facing teams who have ended up in the hospital over mental health caused by burn out and stress at this company, but no one in sales. Why would you make a statement in front of the whole company that “AE of the year” is the most prestigious award you can receive, so that everyone else who got an award in other departments could know that they never measure up to your precious sales people? Why are the AEs who are consistently rewarded the ones who have screwed over all other business partners to the point that they’ve made multiple people cry and we’re the cause of all my own customers’ escalations? Why are we teaching the sales stuff that they are in island and that the effects of their actions on all of the teams around them don’t matter in comparison to their sales numbers? This is toxic and disgusting. Go research some of the top sales teams in Fortune 500 spaces. There is one that is one of the most successful of all time, and they actually force their sales people to spend a day in each service job so that they understand the direct impact of their actions on everyone around them. How can we claim that one of our core values is “be a great team” when sales is allowed to behave however they want with no consequences for how they affect all other teams? This needs to stop. They cannot continue to be measured as “successful” on one metric alone, while the rest of us work 12-14 hour days scrambling to fix their messes. It might sound like I hate this company, but I actually love it. That’s why I’m so angry. I know the potential we have, and I’m tired of watching us slash at the branches with our initiatives instead of cutting this crap off at the roots (PRODUCT, documentation, focus on process so we can function like a large company not a scrambling start up).