New Relic marketing is still a great opportunity and our CMO isn't a toxic person
Pros
I saw a recent review by someone and I think it's a bit unfair so I wanted to throw my two cents out there. New Relic went through some serious growth and is moving on to its next chapter. That required a rethink regarding how we function as a business, including how we go to market. When you're flush with cash from VCs and growing like crazy it really is a ton of fun and you feel like you're on top of the world, but it can give you a false sense of reality and/or importance. We established a great brand and REALLY fun marketing culture pre-IPO, but there were changes that needed to be made to move the company to the next level. We couldn't be as loose with our money, we needed to get better at working with sales, we had to get better at landing larger customers and going into new markets, we had to get better at selling within our base, we had to learn to sell a wider portfolio of products. All this meant we needed to makes changes, including some of the roles we had previously put in place. It's easy to criticize those who have to make tough decisions, and sure, in retrospect you can always see better ways to make them. All in all they were the right decisions for the business. In the eyes of the new CMO, people who were let go either didn't map to the new strategy. I also personally saw some resisted the change to their own detriment or IMO were not quite the high performers they considered themselves to be. Is our CMO perfect? No, nobody is -- he's a human being. But he's not a toxic person. I feel he's pretty reasonable and makes decisions he feels are best for the business. While that doesn't always line up with each individual's personal interests, it's not personal. So all that said, what are the pros as I see them for New Relic? There's a huge market opportunity for this company as more enterprises are shifting to the cloud and we're seeing strong revenue growth as we perfect addressing the enterprise market. To me that means a lot because the company's growth translates to an opportunity for personal growth. While learning how to function as a growing business will bring new challenges, if you can adapt to that change and bring a positive attitude you will be rewarded here and you will have fun.
Cons
Sometimes things move a bit slower than i'd like. As we have grown there are more perspectives you have to take account for and more competing interests for resources, so you have to be patient sometimes. It can also be hard here at times for an introverted person. We are having to work a fair amount to build better alignment across a variety of teams which means lots of relationship building (aka -- politics). If you're not comfortable doing this, you may find it difficult to move ahead and have your ideas heard. I'd also say our HR team has historically been a bit sub-par, but we recently brought in a new head who I hope can turn that around. Finally, I'd say we're still trying to figure out what our culture should be now. There's always been this split between SF and PDX, but it does seem to be coming together more recently. On the SF side, the culture feels a bit bland and lacking a strong sense of identity. I think the answer is Lew continuing to re-establish his presence and a serious investment in professional development, where we create a culture excellence in each person's domain expertise.
