Pros
I loved the vast majority of people I worked with at Valant. Nearly everyone on both the customer facing and internal teams were great. Company and mission are fascinating, and having a CEO with hands-on industry knowledge is big boon. The office is pretty centrally located and easy to get to, and there's lots of food and coffee options in the area. Compensation/benefits are reasonable and fair for a young, smaller company.
Cons
- Priorities of the company in pushing the new product appear to be strongly influenced by Board of Directors/investors seeking to recoup investments immediately rather than letting the product grow to where it needs to be. The sales apparatus has the same problems that sales has always had since time immemorial - overpromise clients to close deals, then immediately disappear from the clients' life, leaving support and engineering to clean up messes. - Some core functions of the product management team appear to have been hijacked by other teams/departments - we were told that certain customer facing personnel would be gathering and prioritizing features/functionality. Currently the product management team has been largely relegated to crunching highly technical documents, a task better suited for those with deep industry knowledge or someone in a traditional "technical/business analyst" role. - Current state of installation/implementation for new clients is terrifying. There is very little process, which results in multiple departments getting overly involved and inevitable turf wars. Company currently lacks both technical analysts and implementation consultants, two roles which are absolutely vital if they plan to be widely selling and installing the new product. - Company has hired some overseas staff and looks to add more - it's disheartening to see the company going overseas to underpay someone when there's so much engineering talent locally available in Seattle.