Pros
Fast paced growth, global expansion, evolving product, opportunities to adapt and grow with the business. Three complimentary acquisitions in less than 2 years including retention of talented team members from acquisitions. If you want to grow in your career, there are plenty of opportunities, some roles haven’t been created yet. C-suite not afraid of making bold decisions and personnel changes where needed. Recent changes in engineering roles and reduction of managers to individual contributors is a great example. The ratio of managers to individual contributors was too high, especially in QA roles, and release failures were not improving, change was necessary. While not popular, a bold decision was needed to make improvement. The reaction from several of the managers and senior leaders. provided great insight to the lack of mature leadership adaptability and why the change was necessary. A public company cannot operate in a start up mode forever, change is necessary and adaptability needs to be a core competency of every manager and above level. Our CTO leads by example, has brought customer focus to the forefront of the engineering team and had to address leaders and individual contributors who were more focused on the life balance of the equation for too many years.
Cons
Too much focus on “the next set of features” and insufficient understanding of adaptation and customer usage of current feature set. Fixing the current feature set should take equal priority to new features. Lack of robust change management processes and tracking of change impact. Maturation of several teams and many leaders who have grown with the company is insufficient to lead change. Many of the teams and individuals are not prepared for the change velocity that we are currently experiencing and there is unnecessary angst and lack of focus because of this. Leadership and management development in key competencies is needed.
