My biggest frustration was that the company continually spoke of the investment they were making in us as employees to ensure we were getting the correct messaging. This investment was time carved out for a daily stand up (30m a day, 8:30-9), tribe meetings (1 hour a week), and things like that. My position was always - if i have to carve out 5 hours a week for internal meetings, and i always need to work 45-60 hours a week, the investment is coming from me bc you are taking away from my ability to get work done during business hours, so my family and social life suffers.
There is an absolute disconnect between those who make decisions and those who have to execute on the work. The job role isn’t well defined for incoming employees - think of yourself as a client facing project manager and plan to learn the ins-and-outs of the software to be successful. Solvers are supposed to be “seekers” which really means you need to figure a lot out on your own. The first year (through AE and ACA) will likely leave you questioning your decision to work there but if you do work hard to develop great relationships with tech and support teams, year two and beyond get better and better.
The company tends to roll products / changes out with little change management. You do get used to it and find ways to manage it with your clients. If the products aren’t things you can control, you’ll end up with some very angry clients and you’ll struggle to navigate conversations because you yourself won’t have the answers.
As a COL, you’ll find yourself managing aspects of your client that you don’t feel make sense for you to own. For example, ive had to micromanage member level transactions (i.e requests from employees received from the call center), carve out time to be available for the call center to IM with directly to tell them how to manage calls as they get them, place calls out to members directly, completely audit the results of data files, own 100% of all the testing in your clients environment (including developing test plans, etc). Not a huge deal but it makes managing your other tasks very difficult and truthfully, it’s stuff i cut my teeth in the industry doing 10-15 years ago. The role was sold to me as a more senior strategy role and it is not that at all. You are managing day-to-day operations with benefit managers and Hr teams. The better you are at the system, the more strategic you can become but it takes time to get there and it’s not really considered a part of the COL role. That sort of thing funnels through your director with you as the COL more or less gathering info and documenting stuff.
It feels weird to put this stuff as cons because the job functions themselves aren’t “cons” they are just the job. I suppose the con is that often, people who are very seasoned in the industry end up in this more tactical role and get frustrated with just how day-to-day it is. And it can be very hard to grow out of that role if you are great at it because most COLs aren’t and the risk of pulling the great COLs off of that work is too high, so many leave. Or you get the toughest clients to rehabilitate and the rinse and repeat cycle gets very boring if you truly want to be in a strategic role.
Additionally, in my experience there, the company was incredibly reactive vs projecting. Little focus on things that could blow up because there was too much focus on putting the small fires out. This resulted in perpetual fire fighting and little attention paid to risks, creating a cycle.
