Kingfisher reviews

There’s too much work, you can tell the teams used to be a lot bigger. They push that no one should ever have to do overtime or work weekends but it’s the only way to get any work done! And to make it worse you literally have endless meetings every single day which delays the work more or you even get more work from those meetings which then adds on to the workload. There’s also very vague job titles that don’t really make any sense you don’t really know who does what but it turns out they’re all important for your job to be done, the processes are a bit of a mess too especially when you have everyone screaming at you how much they need their work done asap. To add on this the pay is really bad compared to other companies which especially during this cost of living just adds on to this stress.

People / management: • The structure of the leadership team is very incoherent. I worked on the team responsible for DIY.com, and there's a lot of "delivery" and "product owners" who "own" a tiny part of the product and whose competence varies wildly. Some are great, but others are not. Seemingly London based management and their Southampton counterpart are a world apart. • Top management are very remote. Every once in a while they would swoop in and make some broad announcements, such as the closure of the Moorgate office, or that they were taking things in a different direction, but on a day-to-day business they were nowhere to be seen or heard from. • Decision making seems to be really difficult for KF, despite being the parent company. Subsidiary companies dictate the direction of the work based on their inability to adopt new technology. Office / working environment: • The Moorgate 'Digital Hub' was closed and merged into the corporate head office in Paddington, which was a huge downgrade in terms of location and facilities. Moorgate had a startup feel, but with big company backing - now its just a 'business as usual' corporate office. Tech: • DIY.com is slowly become the "new legacy" platform. Once launched it was blazing fast as all the third-party bloatware that dogged the old website was cut, but since the new DIY.com launched, lots of people came out of the woodwork to ask for their "piece" (analytics, marketing, tracking, upselling, retargetting, live chat, etc) to be put into the new website. Slowly, piece by piece the new website became more bloated and with no performance testing being done, the end-to-end user experience slowly degraded.