It’s quite sad how much of a downturn the product organization has taken in the past couple years. What used to be a phenomenal culture has deteriorated into a shell of itself. Much of this lies at the feet of product leaders, who are far too often either incompetent, cowardly, or both.
Constant reorganizations and restructures mean you can never get too comfortable in your product space. Another team with nothing to build might start working closely with product line leadership in secret on next year’s initiatives. You’ll find yourself, your team, and your mission rendered worthless because some other team (with individuals that leadership likes personally) is now redesigning everything on their own. Good luck building a roadmap with no product space to operate in (and if your engineers don’t keep the PRs coming in, you’ll be held to blame.)
What used to be small, autonomous teams working within a defined product space, has now turned into this amorphous blob of alignment syncs and cross-functional gamesmanship. Your success depends on how well you can build a cult of personality with peers across product lines. Bad ideas of from longtime favorites get built, good ideas from other people get squashed. Middle management doesn’t help with this very much, other than to occasionally step in and kill a project that counteracts their previously held beliefs (despite any user research or business data that may point to the contrary.) In the rare times when leadership assigns a project they came up with, no accountability is taken when that project fails. Blame often falls to ICs even in cases where those ICs recommended not to build something that leadership pushed. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Promotions are more personality based than performance based, given to those who toe the line and are the most agreeable. I’ve seen some people get promoted in PM, design, and engineering who shipped complete failures of projects. But leadership liked them personally, they were active in Slack channels (“yay go team! ”), and had tenure at the company. Middle management can be vindictive and retaliatory, and because you can’t move internally without their approval, you can get stuck in a negative feedback loop if you aren’t one of their favorites.
Outside of the product organization, the tone and vibes from company leadership are incredibly negative and demotivating. Something was said in a company meeting that “what got us here to this point, isn’t going to get us to the next level.” The hubris to throw out the culture that made HubSpot a place people loved to work is incomprehensible. Instead, HubSpot has sadly become a place many people are trying to leave as fast as they can (reflected in many of the recent reviews here.)
