Could be so much better - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso DJI

- The company culture is centered around catering to the CEO’s every whim, including using the company values system and culture platforms to create a personality cult around him. He insists on being involved in decision-making at every level, including decisions in areas outside his core expertise (engineering). As a result, the company is in constant chaos due to him advocating sudden structural changes or inserting himself randomly into the workflow of product launches. No one stands up to him or criticizes him because he has a track record of firing and bullying people that do. - Company leadership is made up of the CEO’s inner circle instead of hiring or promoting people to management based on aptitude. At DJI, your highest line manager often has no experience whatsoever in your role and is there because of their relationship with the CEO or his inner circle. The dreaded “Product Experience Team” exemplifies this nepotism. Members of this team are entitled to make changes to products and the product launch schedule with limited oversite. And they use this power frequently to bully lower-level employees and enforce ham- last-minute changes that disrupt months of carefully organized work by people below them. - The company’s product lineups and releases often have more to do with the opinions of the CEO and the R&D department rather than what users want. This includes making odd decisions like the CEO arbitrarily changing the product naming structure in 2020 because “someone told him DJI users might be more familiar with individual product names and not the overall DJI brand.” So instead of using cool and exciting names like Mavic Air 2 or Ronin 2, there is now DJI Air 2 and DJI R2. Unfortunately, this decision was also massively disruptive to E-commerce sales traffic and channels due to the primary search keywords for DJI products being oriented around the original naming structure. In addition, they do little to no direct user research, and the research they conduct is often poorly-written multiple-choice surveys asking users if they like a new feature the R&D team has implemented. - The company culture is controlled from the top-down by the R&D department. They are given a deity-like status in their ability to have decision-making power over virtually everything, including sales plans, retail store layouts, and marketing slogans. As a result, they routinely make changes to products and crucial processes they are not qualified to make. Conversely, anyone who is not a member of R&D is not allowed to criticize their work or behavior. Doing so is a quick way to get branded a “troublemaker” and get fired or pushed out. - The CEO and upper management have zero respect or trust in departments outside R&D, particularly in anything related to Marketing, PR, and any other creative-oriented departments or teams with high numbers of foreign staff. As a result, DJI’s Marketing and PR departments have experienced massive cuts and continuous restructuring over the past two years due to the CEO and his followers making them a scapegoat for their poor management and performance. Also, many talented and high-quality employees in these departments are fleeing the company or have been fired in a process DJI HR calls “reform.” Recently, they have been purging foreigners working in high-level management roles. The company’s brand image hasn’t suffered massively due to its monopoly on the drone and camera gimbal markets. Still, the results will be apparent over the next two to five years as the brand image suffers and declines due to a lack of international Marketing and PR talent. DJI has not shown a willingness to compensate by hiring high-quality external firms to run marketing campaigns and instead tries to outsource important creative assets to external vendors that bid the lowest prices and offer the fastest turnaround. The quality of outsourced work is appalling. - Talented employees eventually get worn out and leave DJI, which creates a vacuum of experienced leaders in middle management roles. While this kind of situation can be ideal for younger employees to gain leadership experience by stepping into a management role, no existing senior managers are competent enough to train and mentor them. The result is a “next-man-up” scenario where people without the proper skills or experience get promoted because they stuck around long enough, or they were good at their previous role (e.g., “You were a great sales manager, so that means you can lead the Marketing and Localization departments, right?”). The result is usually a lot of micromanaging and fake-it-til-you-make-it leadership, where your managers over-manage the few areas where they feel competent to make decisions. Overall, this makes for a toxic team environment. -The saddest thing about DJI is that everyone who works there can see its massive potential to become something extraordinary if it weren't for the convoluted decisions and incompetent leadership by the CEO and upper management. The company truly excels at making great drones and camera stabilizers, but they will never achieve the level of impactfulness they ascribe to themselves because they are focused on pleasing the CEO and upper management, rather than meeting the needs of the end-user or building a good brand image.