At one point, I thought Sprout was going to be the last company I worked for before I retired. But eight years later and a pivot to trying to be a billion dollar company and enterprise focused, leadership has really failed to grow what made the company great and has damaged the culture irreparably. Since nobody in leadership has ever grown a company to be that big and has never lead a company that big, they have no idea what they are doing and are just grasping at whatever other companies are doing currently. See the recent R&D reorg to "adjust to industry standards" which got rid of 15% of the staff and left everybody else with more work to do. They're literally putting "must have worked at a billion dollar revenue company" in job descriptions for senior leadership. The CEO is grasping at "Have you thought about working harder?" and the usual LinkedIn "thoughtleader" BS as a way to motivate the company. Leadership's naiveté is resulting in some poor hiring decisions. The latest crop of hires are really good on selling a story (which is how they got the job in the first place) but have no idea on execution. In my experience, these people last about two years before leadership realizes they don't know what they're doing and are shown the door. You can also see that pattern in their LinkedIn profile where they're only in a position for about a year or two moving onto another one. They're just using their current position as a stepping stone to a new one before they get found out.
To those who claim "these are growing pains and are typical corporate things", that's the issue. I've seen other companies keep their culture, not hire charlatans, be successful and not have to result in ruining everything that was great that got the company to that point in order to grow. It's also survivorship bias, were those companies successful because they adopted the industry standard ratios, quick to fire culture, etc. or in spite of those choices. Were the new ways of working the new VPs want to bring in the reason why that person was successful or were they successful in spite of those new ways of working?
