Strong culture and investment in employees, aggressive roadmap
Pros
- Awesome culture around experimentation. We A/B test nearly everything in order to make data-informed decisions. We are also getting bolder and more mature in how we experiment, and are willing to test crazy things with a small exposure in order to find new mountains and opportunities to tackle. - People have an open mind. As someone who loves process improvement and feels there's always a better way to do something, I appreciate that my colleagues and leaders are open to trying new things. I don't have to fight an uphill, bureaucratic battle to have an impact. Usually the consensus is, "let's try it and see if it works." +1 for testing and experimentation culture. - CK invests in it's employees. From surface-level perks (free coffee bar with the best coffee in the area, full bars, spa, video games, ping pong table (that people actually use on a daily basis)), to impressive events ("field day" is epic, holiday events, company celebrations: the events team goes all out), to employee growth and learning (for example, Credit Karma University, where internal employees and external guests teach classes that are free to employees; also each employee gets a substantial budget to pursue learning outside of CK for conferences, classes, certifications, etc. For example, I'm using my budget to pursue a PMP certification). CK makes it clear that they believe in their employees' long term success and are willing to go above and beyond "superficial" perks. - Related to the above, work/life balance is great. With the exception of a few teams, I think the vast majority of folks are able to have a flexible schedule to allow for doctors appointments, picking up kids from school, staying home to get a delivery, etc. As long as you aregetting your work done, everyone is very supportive and flexible. - Executive leadership has not compromised on company mission. Our mission is to make financial progress possible for everyone, which is why all of our services are free. At multiple company town halls, people have asked "will we ever charge for our services?" and the answer is always a passionate "no". CK leadership does an excellent job of balancing the need for revenue and to drive business with their morals and mission. It's really motivating and makes me feel good about what we're doing. When people ask me my favorite thing about CK, this is number 1. I've never seen another company that is this committed to doing what's right.
Cons
Credit Karma is still learning how to operate at scale. There are a lot of dependencies across teams which creates overhead. The roadmap is aggressive so there are extensive conversations around priorities and alignment, and the coordination can sometimes slow us down. CK is also transforming in many ways at once - we are upgrading technology while trying to build features on top of it, creating new teams, and working to ship a number of large features that are dependent on one another. Sometimes it feels like we are building the plane while we're trying to fly it which can be inefficient and stressful. At the end of the day, in my mind, these problems (scale, dependencies, priorities, alignment) are solvable, and we are getting better, we just haven't solved them yet. For me personally, these are the kinds of problems I like to solve so it's difficult and at times frustrating, but engaging.
