Manager - Recensione dipendente - Manager presso Urban Ladder

1,0
9 feb 2017
Consiglia
Gradimento del CEO
Pronostico commerciale

Vantaggi

UL has a few things going for it 1) Customer focus - getting the service experience right 2) Beautiful products 3) Lots of once-passionate employees4

Svantaggi

1) Self inflicted burden of coolness. While the company was making significant losses, it decided to move to a fancy office and dedicated significant amount of money & time to decorate it. There is a palpable air of coolness in UL maybe because of its positioning as a design led brand(although less than 5% revenue comes from UL original designs. The rest are modifications of legs, knobs etc to existing vendor designs & there are no more than 3 furniture designers in the entire company) 2) A fair number of less than capable people at the top who have grown too big for their boots. With titles like VP and SVP becoming common currency in startups for early employees, the early batch of senior management is far from great. Apart from being incompetent because they handle functions which they were never trained for, their interpersonal & team management skills are often wanting 3) The CEO is rude, caustic and a mini-tyrant. Even the COO faces the brunt of his sarcastic barbs in open forums. The senior management, because of their own lack of capability, function as yes men to the CEO & nod consent to his ever changing whims & fancies. He is a typical case of a consultant who is sharp and intelligent but stops being humble & self critical. Most importantly, he never learnt to be a decent human being. He cant even take a joke about himself without a sharp & often personal retort. A highly immature leader who lacks self assessment & poise. 4) Lack of vision & strategic depth - Absolute unwillingness+inability to see realities of the market led to UL missing important pivots. A late & poorly executed Interior Design Service. Delaying the offline launch. Over simplistic market sizing to draw investments. Everyone makes mistakes but if a bunch of fairly smart people who got the basics right make so many poor moves, there is no coming back

avatar
Risposta di Urban Ladder
9y
Thanks for your feedback and acknowledgement of the pros. Thanks for your clear feedback on the cons too. We have called out a ton of our mistakes here https://the-ken.com/kicking-the-habit/ (behind a paywall) There are quite a few mistakes we have done on the spends, on products, on people, and on multiple fronts. We have clearly learnt from those mistakes and are moving ahead and setting them right. We are designing a lot more of our ranges, we are moving back to a smaller but more energetic office space, we have done a bunch of people empowerment, org redesign and goal setting to set right people items, and are focusing on fewer bets and trying to win the main ones of retail and interior design. While we would have liked to have done a better job at all of the above in our first shot at it, we have put the mistakes past us and are moving ahead with much better execution. I would love to share more in-depth details of the current situation if you can get in touch with me at rajiv at urbanladder dot com.

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5,0
23 lug 2015
Dipendente anonimo
Consiglia
Gradimento del CEO
Pronostico commerciale

Vantaggi

good prepossess and people make this place interesting. management is understanding and helps out to get things done.

Svantaggi

many new idea need to be incorporated, sometimes it is seasonal. three is not a good vision on new products but very strong current products.

avatar
Risposta di Urban Ladder
8y
Thanks for the feedback. We are working on making sure we establish a strong engine for our product thinking so that our products for the future are also hits similar to our current products. Please do feel free to send any specific feedback or ideas on the same to rajiv at urbanladder dot com.
4,0
26 nov 2019
Consiglia
Gradimento del CEO
Pronostico commerciale

Vantaggi

PeopUL, quality work and cULture

Svantaggi

The leadership team should think about the potential risks in greater detail.

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