The company value of "impatience" means that we move fast. It can be hard to keep up, and sometimes we throw things out into the world that aren't finished, and those things can crash and burn. You need to be comfortable with failure and how to learn from it. It also means you may not always agree with the priorities of the company or other teams – although all of those priorities boil down to customer obsession and intense business focus (the "work hard" in "work hard, play hard").
As a queer woman, it didn't feel great to watch the company pull back from celebrating their ERG communities, removing employee events and retracting public statements around Pride month, Black History month, etc. But I respect that we're making the company business-focused, and I do feel safe and supported to be my authentic self - we still have ERG resources available to employees and are given volunteer time off work each year to contribute to causes that are important to us outside of work.
I have also felt disappointed about some key feature requests and inefficiencies our team runs into with the product that are often deprioritized by R&D teams. In particular, accessibility (designing a product that complies with accessibility standards) – for a company that is so customer-obsessed, it feels like a miss to not prioritize accessibility. As well as internal feature requests from our support team to remove blockers and inefficiencies in our work. There is often the response that we just need to move so quickly in this industry that some things need to be deprioritized so we can stay ahead on the big things. But when our support team is being pushed to deliver on faster response times while we're shipping hundreds of features per year, making the product more complex, and releasing new pricing, it can be disappointing to have our own feature requests deprioritized while being asked to deliver on those objectives. I will say that this is improving, we are now dedicating more resources to deliver on our support team's needs, but it has taken years to get this far – the sense of "do more with less" is slowly decreasing.
Eoghan (CEO): Probably wouldn't invite the guy over for Christmas dinner with my queer friends and found family, but I respect the f*ck out of his business focus and the way he's turning Intercom into an industry leader. We needed what he brought, and his laser focus is driving us to succeed.
