Vantaggi
There’s still a ton of upside to drive value and the flywheel of the business model will continue to drive growth unless senior leaders make major mistakes. The problems to solve are interesting and challenging and the work is also interesting. Majority of people are smart and great to work with.
Svantaggi
Culture is going in the wrong direction and I can say this with high confidence because I’ve been at Wayfair for a few years. Used to love the culture, even if it wasn’t for everyone, and I no longer feel that way. Leaders (VP and up) don’t talk to each other enough and are completely disconnected and don’t care about how things get done. Directors are unable to influence up and mostly manage people. The manager doer concept we used to rightfully brag about at all levels is dead. This yields poor choices galore including picking too many and the wrong (including conflicting) things to work on, losing grasp on the growing burnout of folks who actually do the work, growing lack of empowerment for teams to drive the agendas they were hired to drive and a feeling of inertia. To be clear this isn’t just about staffing shortages, we just need to completely wasting time on middling ROI work and focus on a few things that will propel Wayfair’s growth in the next decade. Finally, I have to say that my trust in the C-suite is waning. Niraj keeps screaming at his teams to do more and do it faster and no one is there to actually help him make good choices or dare I say disagree with him. And they just don’t know and their directors and VPs are scared to tell them what they really think.