1. It's no longer able to sustain the results that it has promised its investors and on its way to being bought out. No longer a startup, but a growth company, and it needs to deliver it's growth numbers.
2. Upper management keeps to be constantly 'managed up' by the middle managers. It drains the middle managers, and ultimately us. Perhaps the upper managers try to prove themselves that they 'belong' to top apps?
3. Middle managers lack critical and analytical thinking - I've been there for a year and I'm still struggling to find evidence on analytical thinking around strategy - basic things like "Here are the three levers to growth", is still absent. Instead, currently it's "Let's do strategy X", without much transparency around why we forgo the alternatives.
4. They don't know who their users are - Yeah, ask them in the interview 'who are your users? Describe them to me? Individuals? Family?' They won't be able to answer, not even the Product Managers
5. They do very little tests - Ask them about AB tests, and how much they are doing that now. They are doing a few, but this is far behind what you would expect from a high growth company. There still isn't a practice around that.
6. Ostracized for debating / asking questions - I worked in a meeting between Engineering and Product, and my team got a lot of feedback about our work, which I thought was fair, and even excited. I later found that my team head went and complain to the other team about overly harsh and critical, and thereafter we didn't hear feedback from the other team - what a shame.
7. Politics and nepotism are rampant
