This is a company without conviction. A company that has truly lost its way. Here are a few of the reasons why.
The leadership team are dominated by a Dutch cabal of naive, ridiculously fortunate people who have removed themselves from direct contact with the product and people. The incongruity of them parading their badge of humbleness along with their celebrity status at events is lost on them.
Having never led a business through any serious challenges and bereft of ideas, the current strategy is as ill thought as it is limiting.
The CPO is dangerous. It beggars belief that he has risen to this level given his paucity of industry experience. He excels at giving an opinion with both an absence of wisdom and a lack of conviction. He appears to be labouring under a mistaken belief that reading a few business books will raise him on a par with industry product design champions.
He is widely known for the cynical removal of experienced product leaders who might have challenged him, the avoidance of accountability and an utter disregard for his direct reports. However, he does like a drink, so opportunities for career growth can be found outside the office with a willingness to plump up his ego and play to his insecurities.
It aids him greatly that the CEO has zero interest or capability for product insight and vision. Instead she trots out vague sentiments heavily laced with company nostalgia. This is not inspiring.
Some people are pretty good. You’d expect that in a company of this size but every one who racks up a decent tenure here has their own list of shocks and weird stuff that happens. Be it poor decision making, inappropriate behaviour against women, volte face reinvention of bad ideas or the uncanny, continual meetings where people talk in a clunky mix of meaningless business jargon and plain balderdash.
Restructures are common, these keep several tiers of managers in their jobs. There is a lot of busy work. Most managers and leaders of the technology teams may have once been competent developers but are now responsible for people management. That they are woefully under schooled in this, especially in the critical skill of good old fashioned empathy, is another marker of promoting people beyond their emotional intelligence.
With a deeply political environment do not expect promotions will have a rational or equate with demonstrable ability.
For all the desperate promotion of the company values, the massive growth of recruitment led to dissolution of the culture and radical dilution of experience. The hiring bar was surprisingly low for a very long time.
This perspective is not an outlier. It’s recognised by most who have spent at least a couple of years here. There are many, many people clocking in and checked out. All waiting for another windfall from vested stock. Plenty of people are looking over their shoulder to check they are still under the radar. You can drift, you can collect the salary and you can hide. It’s a shame because there are still those who really want to make a difference. Some more cynical folks rub their hands in glee at the thought of the company being subpoenaed to release archives of internal communications. There is so much gold.
Meanwhile, the delusion of a hive of innovation persists in desperate attempts to build out new product ranges. These are woeful in their conception and implementation. Further evidence of an anti-Midas product lead. With nothing of worth or impact being delivered the illusion of success is masterfully presented. It is all smoke and mirrors.
The company has a collective amnesia on how to build a valued and effective product from the ground up but it is brilliant at finessing a mature product lathered with persuasive patterns (continually straying over the ethical line), monetising the traffic and selling hotel rooms in established regions.
On the factory floor, the tropes of being data driven are reductionist as the dogma approaches dangerous levels . Citing persistent customer feedback or indeed voicing an empathy for the customer falls on fallow ground.
Expertise in the analysis of data is presumed by everyone yet practised by a few. Target chasing of a pointless metric has led to decisions that have crippled the product yet the rise of customer dissatisfaction remains ignored. If the line goes up to the right everyone is happy.
Good tools in the wrong hands has led to the wrong metrics being measured and sometimes these aren’t even measured accurately. Collect all the data you like, if you can’t interpret, apply insight or try to understand why something is happening then you are left with the fallacy of being data driven whilst your short term success is built on sand.
The company is moribund but such is its size the death throes will not be realised for years. There are better places to work.
