Once a great company, but lost their way - Anonymous employee Outreach Employee Review

*Toxic culture - They value politics over skills and knowledge. Recently a lot of smart, tenured people have walked out the door (in some cases, to competitors) because Outreach will not give them the acknowledgement or rewards that they deserve. Many of these people are or were underpaid, and often blocked from any upward mobility because less talented leaders above them are afraid these employees will make them look bad. Those leaders usually know how to play the game but not how to do their jobs, and the tenured employees who know what they are doing will often burn out in that kind of environment. People will often steal other people’s ideas and not give them credit, presenting the idea as their own. But because they spoke the loudest in the room, leadership buys the lie and gives that person a raise or promotion. This company just breeds toxic leadership. They changed the company values several times, so no one knows what they are anymore and even if they did, leadership doesn’t care if anyone follows them. They’d rather promote those who kiss up to leadership than someone who knows what they are doing and will be honest. *Product & process knowledge is gone - Tenured employee turnover plus lack of enablement has caused major brain drain. The people who knew how everything worked were burnt out having to enable the rest of the team, and were never rewarded for it. No one even tried to make sure anything was documented properly. Even people whose job it was to document how the system worked didn’t know it. And leadership never incentivized new team members to research or learn, so no one bothered to learn anything. When smart, tenured people left, the knowledge left with them. Now, product and engineering doesn’t know how customers use the system, CX can’t answer basic customer questions, and Sales promises things the system can’t do. So many customers are churning because no one is listening to them or helping them, but leadership scrambles and just repeats the same mistakes that were made before. *Lack of direction - The founder/CEO stayed on for way too long, and by the time he left It was obvious he no longer cared and was bored. But he at least had a vision and some direction in earlier days. In the last few years, Outreach has been a revolving door of new, inexperienced executives who come in with some “new” strategy that’s really just a repeat of something the company tried and failed at in the past (see previous bullet point). They come in, ruin the company even more somehow, overstay their welcome, then leave with the exec title on their resume so they can inflict their incompetence on some other unsuspecting company. *Major resentment between departments - Leadership doesn’t really know or understand what their own team is supposed to do, never mind other departments. So when their bad ideas fail, they tend to point fingers somewhere else. When another team comes to them saying their team did something wrong (which happens a lot, because again, no enablement), even if it’s in good faith, managers and leaders tend to dismiss the feedback and criticize the other team. If your own team doesn’t even know its own job, how is it supposed to know how to work with others? *Relying on past success, lacking innovation - The company rolls out half-built new features all the time for the sake of getting some new differentiator out on the market. Usually, it’s not a feature anyone actually needs, or it’s too little too late. How are they supposed to build the right features when no one really understands the customers or the market? The company loves to talk down about other competitors and just assumes people will buy the product due to name recognition, but that’s a mistake. Others are innovating in this market and working hard to deeply understand their customers and make sure they’re supported. They’ll eventually surpass Outreach.