• So. Much. Attrition. The company has lost two C-level executives, at least two VPs (you lose count) and several directors so far this year. For a company of less than 150 employees, this represents some serious challenges. The Marketing team has lost almost all of its leadership this year. The Customer Success and Customer Support teams had a complete turnover of leadership structure in the last 15 months (from VP down to managers). The Product team lost almost all of their Product Managers and Product Owners over the last 9 months. Senior leadership continues to weave the narrative that all of these people are "running towards" something else and "not running away from FastSpring". At some point, even the densest among us are going to stop believing that.
• Hiring freezes in place are impacting the ability of some teams to backfill for all this attrition, so those teams are forced to cobble together semi-functional processes. Business continuity is almost nonexistent, where automations and workflows simply stop working as a result of poorly handled departures. Critical roles are being outsourced to BPOs who lack the insight and availability to handle all the work required.
• The company's business model makes it particularly susceptible to economic whims. Growth, planning, bonuses and hiring are all dependent on a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants hope that people are going to spend more and more money on digital goods. When people stop doing so, the money stops coming in. See "Hiring freezes..." above.
• Senior leadership ranges from feckless to abusive. It's difficult to have a strong opinion about the CEO, who has all the presence and utility of white toast. Sure, toast ostensibly brings value, and might be good to mop up eggs in a pinch, but at the end of the day, most of us find it pointless to have on the plate. I guess the CEO is saying all the right things to the board, but for those of us down in the trenches it's a lot of talking in circles and not a lot of results. On the other hand, the CEO's hiring processes are highly suspect. Some of the senior leaders brought in over recent months have been a very, very poor fit for the culture that previously existed (or that presumably exists anywhere that isn't the 1980s). A lot of aggressive alpha male energy that comes across as abusive and dismissive. The CTO has been accused, in various circles, of having racial bias--to the point where some members of the Engineering team have explicitly offered to suggest things to him, knowing that the suggestion would be better received coming from them.
• It's 2022 and the company refuses to purge the term "whitelist" from their products and processes. There's no DEI initiative. One member of the C-suite questioned whether Juneteenth is a real holiday. A lot of employees who identify as women, POC or LGBTQI have left, and a lot of their replacements have been straight (often white) men. This failure of the company to invest in values that are becoming increasingly important to the workforce will make it a less attractive destination for future employees.
• Very few of the company decisions are driven by data. Most of the Product roadmap is focused on feature parity with competitors, or solving niche problems that affect a select few, high-value customers. Anecdotal feedback from Sales teams are taken at face value, and requests to quantify that feedback have a very high probability of being ignored.
• There's no consistent effort to maintain engagement in the remote workforce. Public channels in Slack are ghost towns. There are lunch & learns scheduled, but are, more often than not, just lunch placeholders because no one is scheduled for the "learn" part. At a team level, we have zero regularly-occurring activities focused on bonding or engagement.
