Great potential lost to poor strategy and execution - Recensione dipendente - Middle Manager presso Otava

Otava is a 30ish year old company with a lot of history, many happy that have been around for well over a decade, and many long term employees as well. Due to the # of employees and the mid-size nature of the business everyone wears a lot of hats. This means that everyone also has to be a self starter, self manager, and self motivator. For those that do well in this type of environment it is a great place to work. For those that need constant micro-management it may not be the best fit. The company always seems to be making incremental improvements in all aspects of the business. The employees and teams are all genuinely good people that want to do right by the customer and help other departments internally.

The same things that I listed as pros could also be cons for some people if they are not a fit for this size company. For me, I don't see any obvious cons

Some very good people working there at the IC and management level. They mean well and work hard. VP of sales and CTO are great people.

I have never seen a company get so completely decimated by bad leadership. In the beginning of 2025, OTAVA was in a great position to take advantage of multiple opportunities, and squandered all of it. There were several major direction shifts just last year, none of it was effectively communicated, no one was trained on any of it, and this left the sales team confused and ineffective. - 3 rounds of layoffs - Only one person out of over a dozen made quota - Pay way below industry average, made worse by insane quota numbers - Lots of infighting, support in particular was really bad about this and we lost customers because of it - Deployments team made frequent unforced errors, eroding confidence both from customers and sales - No sense of direction or continuity provided by leadership - Marketing department is completely ineffective - Nepotistic hiring practices - Worst morale I've ever seen from a sales team