Pros
-Extremely fast paced - new (poorly developed) features can go out within days or weeks, instead of months like in other companies. -Even if the above can be treated as pro, I can’t think of any other advantages of joining this company.
Cons
-Top down approach brought to the extreme - the company operates purely on the whims of the CEO and a few VPs. There are quarterly product roadmap planning sessions that every time end up with the entire plan being tossed into the garbage. This is very demotivating as you start feeling like anything you’re doing is worthless. -Addressing employees in a disrespectful manner by some of the top management - there is a serious company culture issue where it is allowed to berate employees and address them in a disrespectful manner without any consequences. Even when other management members acknowledge the behavior is improper, nothing is done about it. This creates an extremely stressful and toxic work environment that leaves you doubting your own self worth and skills. -Lack of delegation and trust in employees - every decision needs to be taken by the top management, including the colors of buttons and placement of page elements. There is zero trust in employees. Even if the decision taking process has been supposedly delegated, the decisions taken continue to be overridden without any sound reason causing chaos and delays. Most importantly it causes decision paralysis among the employees. -Extremely chaotic management - the weekly pipeline calls cause weekly change of priorities. Pretty much every week you and your team need to drop anything you’ve been doing to adjust to the new “wonderful” idea the top management came up with. There is little to no communication about the reasons and goals, you need to trust that they know what is right and what is wrong. -Multiple communication channels, product management tools - due to poorly conceptualized “savings” the company operates within multiple different internal communication platforms, causing chaos in feedback and approval processes. You never know where something has been discussed, where a decision has been taken and you waste time on trying to put everything together. -Trying to be data driven without proper tools or staffing - I need to give to to A1 that it collects an extreme amount of data and there is an overall direction to be more data driven. However the raw data can’t be easily processed, understood and visualized as tools are missing for the purpose. You need to be an SQL expert yourself if you want to understand anything happening in the product as the BA and data teams are very understaffed. The company relies on spreadsheets to a level not seen anywhere else. The management keeps questioning the results and rejecting the reports presented from the data if it doesn’t fit their overall vision. -Tech debt dating to the first day of the company’s existence - all the product teams need to always work on something new, there can’t be any time “wasted” on bringing on improvements or fixing the tech debt. Even introducing fixes to bugs that are known to cause loss and returns require a painful justification and approval process. -Chaotic and/or lacking documentation - There is no process in place to ensure that all of the product and technical documentation is properly captured and stored in an organized hierarchical level. You need to play an archeologist and dig through different places to understand any existing feature in case you need to bring any changes or troubleshoot any issues. -Systems holding it together with cable ties and duct tape - because of the above the MVPs that have proven to be successful can never be properly expanded, leaving in place processes that overly rely on emails, spreadsheets and cheap offshore labor. This leads to huge amounts of human errors as well as system level issues that require painstaking troubleshooting to find the cause of erratic behavior. -Domain experts being the only source of knowledge - because of the issues piling up in the system from all of the never finished MVP’s you spend half of your day on responding to complaints and bug reports, however your only way of finding out why the system worked in the way it did is to ask any remaining domain experts and QA to test and try to recreate the issue in the QA env. This has an impact on the timelines of new features you need to deliver. Also as more domain experts are leaving you’re often left without anyone knowing what is really happening. Be prepared to spend half of your time providing support rather than doing any product work. - You can never be sure that you know the product well - The initial onboarding only allows you to understand the very tip of an iceberg of what is happening in the product. Your onboarding is never complete and even if you’ve consulted half the company before completing your product specs, you can never be sure that something hasn’t been omitted.