With managerial changes after my first few months, the environment turned quite toxic. Because of this, I cannot recommend Forward Financing, at least as a Product Manager. Some examples of this include:
- A lack of professionalism. Example: meetings with the new head of product (early 2018) yelling, hitting the table, swearing, and using derogatory language.
- A passive-aggressive culture: I prefer direct communication, since feedback is often misunderstood when passed through too many channels. In a meeting with executive management earlier this year, I was told by the CEO that they are proud of the "culture of escalation" at Forward Financing. Meaning, if I had any feedback or issues with anyone else in the company, I should speak with my manager, who would speak with their manager (or go up through the CEO), before their manager spoke to that person. This is not only inefficient in most circumstances, but caused a lot of confusion since minor comments were escalated and interpreted as requiring action and manager involvement. Ironically a couple of months after this conversation, the company required all employees to sit through "Radical Candor" training and emphasized the need to address things directly, which seemed extremely out of place for the company culture.
- Employees are not empowered or trusted. Example: A very evident lack of trust from management with the head of product actually telling us, "The CEO doesn't trust you", after acknowledging that there had been no performance issues and we had continued to ship products on time.
- Questions/push-back not encouraged. Example: As a product manager, management told me that employees throughout the company weren't using their time effectively so I was to oversee a project to decrease the amount of emails they received. If employees are unproductive, adjusting their emails won't make them productive. Productive employees proactively find ways to increase efficiency, and forcing them to receive less email notifications (that they wanted to receive anyway), wouldn't have solved the issue. When I pushed back about different ways to approach this, I was told, "Well the CEO wants it so you have to do it, and do it happily".
When I started I was part of a close, collaborative Product Management team with 3 members. That type of drive and collaboration is hard to find in product. However, right before I started another team was formed in the company that had some overlap in responsibilities with Product, which caused confusion. After a few months of being there, we were were given a 9-page mandate of how our role would change to draw a clearer line between the departments. Then that failed and shortly after they re-organized the teams and changed the nature of our jobs so it was significantly different from the job I accepted when I joined the company. In the new "mandate" outlining our job responsibilities, it kept being referred to as "Project Management" and the head of product didn't understand the difference. When I explained the difference, the response was, "I don't care what the definition of Product Management is, this is what we need and you can get on board or not." This didn't inspire much confidence since the role had changed so many times in a short space of time.
Last summer one of those original 3 product managers was fired without any warning, despite being a very well-liked high-performer. Around the same time the other team member quit, and I followed shortly thereafter. The company has a lot of potential and I wish it could have worked out, but the environment became toxic and high performance wasn't enough to feel confident you wouldn't be fired abruptly.
I gave three stars because I had a great experience my first few months and I truly wanted things to work out at Forward Financing, but I cannot recommend it.
