Okta reviews

As an individual contributor CSM, the regional management at Okta is some of the worst I've ever seen. The majority of the RMs & Directors were promoted either because of nepotism or the massive attrition. This brings up day to day challenges as these managers are only looking up, and never managing down. To say there is a lack of direction and cohesion for ICs to get promoted is an understatement. The work-life balance, although being a pro is at times a con. With more than half of the CS org being hired during the pandemic, CSMs are used to working remotely. The new CS management doesn't know how to engage with them, nor do they seem to care. This leads to poor morale and overall a very haphazard CS culture with too many people either not caring about their jobs or many of the CSMs not knowing how to do their jobs. In addition to the above, the CS org consistently lacks in training and direction. Each RM is doing their own thing, and leave it up to the ICs to run their own CS plays (success plans, monthly reviews, QBRs, etc.). Only for this to change at the start of a new FY, when top down management changes their expectations. This doesn't allow for any cohesion between regions nor when customers move regions or segments. The level of skill and effort from CSM to CSM is staggering here and isn't up to snuff at other CS orgs. There are no plans to up-skill managers to be better leaders (or leaders in general), nor up-skill ICs to be better CSMs. This leaves the org to be stagnant and always on the back burner. Other internal orgs do not view CS as leading the charge. Both the SE and AE orgs feel the CS org is beneath them and only recently (in the last 2-3 months) have started to ask and rely on the CS org. The typical motion is that CS is invited to meetings as an after thought (internal QBRs), yet CS needs to pick up post-sales AE work and SE requests. CSMs are expected to be more of a TAM role with deeper knowledge of Okta, if only because the SEs are typically at a pre-sales capacity. This leads to issues when customers ask for more technical conversations and CSMs are left scrambling to find folks internally to help them, typically without much manager oversight. Finally, if it's not bad enough that internally as an IC CSM you have a fairly low chance of a promotion to a P6 or manager (unless their is nepotism involved), Okta's customer's view the CS org and CSMs are nothing more that support+ The reason for this is 2-fold. First, the CSM is sold is part of a support package and the customer feels that they can use the CSM as a support case triage/TAM facilitator to their liking. Finally the CSMs at Okta do not understand, nor know how to speak to the business value of Okta to their customers (there's an entirely different silo for that at Okta). This leaves the CSM as nothing more than a glorified TAM/support escalation manager who is scrambling to find technical resources week to week.