Pros
I've worked with many startups for most of my career -- from Pre-Series A to growth stage, so coming to NewsCred I was really excited about tackling some of the key challenges that they were facing (reducing product churn and helping to contribute to a stronger a design/product culture). For the most part, you have a lot of autonomy and ownership over the work that you do. My manager was very supportive of my efforts and was a great advocate for the small product design team. It's an environment where initiative and hard work can pay off. The people are smart and it's true that the executive team is transparent, hands-on, and approachable. They've made some strong executive hires recently and I hope this will move the company forward.
Cons
NewsCred is a growth stage company, hovering close to 200 employees, but still suffers from some of the core issues of an early stage startup. For example, the lack of focus and a diluted product vision results in a lot of reactionary effort and frankly low quality output. Instead of focusing on important problems like improving poor usability and iterating on key areas of the product -- I was working on new/various product features with unclear KPIs and moved around on different teams, not knowing if what we previously released actually effected change or not. Although the sales and engineering culture are quite developed, NewsCred technically has never had an executive at the table with a design background until fairly recently. When I started, there was no top-down approach to socializing design thinking and user-centricity and this set the stage for poor cross-collaboration between design and other team members. At best, we had moderate success with cohesive collaboration between product, design, and engineering on various squads. At worst, I literally felt like I was being bullied for trying to do my job and build processes to contribute a stronger design practice. As key executives and various advocates for design started leaving the company, this put a lot of strain on the product/design team. I just brushed this off and tried to move forward, but I started to feel really exhausted when most of my effort for the past 9 months was spent trying to better collaboration. It's quite draining when you feel like you have to prove to people that your work matters, instead of being able to do what you think you’re good at -- building products that people love.