The structure supporting the software development cycles causes team leaders to be incredibly inflexible. Managers seemed adverse to making any changes as they were afraid about how this would impact their reports. This struck me as a great example of Goodhart’s Law – metrics becoming targets and ceasing to be good metrics. The software teams use an overly complex, strict, and inflexible "agile" development process.
Upper management does not understand some of their own products. Marketing uses buzzwords for technologies they don’t actually have (smoke and mirrors) and management does not seem willing to make the investment required to actually implement these technologies. The company felt directionless.
There was a strange and pervasive communication culture. My colleagues were unwilling to write substantive messages in chat, rendering MS Teams an absolutely useless tool.
Now that I work for a real tech company, I look back in absolute shock of how things were run at Elevate.