Ironically, Product Delivery is Nerdery's Biggest Problem - Anonymous employee Nerdery Employee Review

This company has 4 things holding it back that need to change immediately if they're going to achieve their true potential of serious and rapid high growth: 1. Growth - This part of the org is fundamentally weakly led, not forced to increase its skill set and the latest promotion cements the reality that this year will be poor in new business. As for organic growth, it's not gonna be much better. I wish I could say there's something to do here, but it basically needs a completely swap of the team, minus a couple of people, not just a new leader. 2. Finance - The accounting system does not give leadership a realistic view of cost-of-sales; and rack rates demanded do not match market for quality delivered - at all. There are better shops doing things for less cost than us by a country mile. This leads to inflated targets that have to be trimmed as the year continues - once reality sets in. Finance also doesn't 'get' market competition. Nerdery gets laughed at for its exorbitant rates and when the outcome quality lags (#4), clients are left wondering what they paid for. 3. Capacity/Resourcing - This area is amateur hour and shields leadership from seeing its very poor decisions that split FTEs into fourths and eighths, while failing to invest in hiring skills that will keep Nerdery ahead of market. The perception that Nerdery is a 'body shop' is highly reinforced by the degree to which this group sees people as expendable and non-unique and does not honor subtle or proactive client needs. The leader here has their job because they lead with force and fear-creation, rather than skill or quality. It's a constant mess. I feel bad because his team are nice and capable people, they're just misled. 4. Product Delivery - This is actually the biggest, festering wound in the company. The head of this area insists they are an expert at digital product delivery management, but they simply are not - they just are the best and fastest talker in the room. This leader is publicly arrogant and controlling to subordinates and privately toxic and disrespectful to almost everyone who questions him. He is good at acting like he has everything under control, but, systematically, has created a way of working where he is the single point of failure and bottleneck for everything. He does not hire or promote people who are better than him or who do not obey him without questioning. He doesn't not create organizational redundancy. He also does not manage out toxic and mediocre people in his organization who have multiple quality and conduct grievances filed against them - he fundamentally thinks those are great people to have around because he can control them. But more than this and worse: he does not know how to run a smooth, well-oiled and modern digital product delivery company. He does not understand, nor has he succeeded in setting up CI/CD, nor does he know how to bring cutting edge ways of product delivery into a wider system for a 200-person consulting force. And it shows every single time we have large projects that are high stakes. They fall apart. Every project is ridiculously different and suffers wildly different and inconsistent outcomes. This chaos ensures that he is critical and necessary whenever things go wrong and reinforces the myth that he is important. In fact, he isn't important or necessary, rather he's the source of the problem - most of his direct reports believe this too, sadly, but are too scared to say so. Nerdery will never, ever, ever be a market leading digital product delivery organization until and unless he is replaced with (or placed under) an industry expert who has done this before and at scale - AND values people development and trusts his team with layered delegation. It's sad - because personally speaking he is a very, very nice guy and loves the company.