Good People, Decent Product, Poor Leadership
Pros
The people at the company are wonderful, although most seem to be disgruntled about their day to day work situation. Most teams intermingle well, having lunch from time to time, and from the younger folks play beerpong, shoot pool, and drink beers. The Engineering and Product teams report to the VP of Engineering, who seems to be doing a great job managing his team and building out some incredible stuff. The stability of the product has increased dramatically since he’s joined, and overall the processes owned by the Product Managers and Engineers seem to be going well. They hit roadblocks here or there, but always come out on top. Sales has recently hit a dark time and is experiencing high turnover, but the company will be hiring a new VP of Sales in the near future, which should hopefully turn things around. The team is clearly unhappy, but hoping for better things to come. Signs aren’t pointing upward, but let’s just say after rarely collecting any commission, it can’t get worse.
Cons
The biggest flaw with the company is the executive leadership. Unfortunately, this group looks at the people that work here as their property, not human beings. You won't see any high fives, and you won't hear "wow team/person xyz did a great job this quarter! Let's give them a round of applause!" Not only that, but you won't hear anyone from the leadership team ask how your weekend was or if there are any good dinner spots in the city, etc. The CEO is new to SaaS, and that combined with his bias towards client executive leadership (vs the people using the product) creates a slightly toxic environment for the people on the ground doing the work. His leadership has created a highly customized solution for these few large clients, and sales is stuck fitting a square peg into a round hole when pitching to new prospects. He’s an operations guy with a manufacturing background, and has made it clear he does not have a proactive Gigwalk company vision/goal, but rather a reactive “build this for them because they’re paying us now” mentality. The company will continue to be mediocre until it finds a way to sell to the masses vs being an R&D dept for a small number of enterprise clients.
