ONE OF THE WORST MANAGED COMPANIES I'VE EVER WORKED AT
Some management issues that I have witnessed and that I have personally experienced at Splice:
- Blaming individuals for poorly written code
- Blaming individuals publicly in meetings for a specific decision in which multiple people were involved
- A hyper-masculine macho culture in which the loudest person in a meeting gets their decision implemented due to emotional exhaustion
- Lack of role definition due to overly aggressive hiring
- No clear reporting structure
- Too much managerial hiring and too little hiring of people who actually execute and deliver on the features and tools that need to be built
- As a tech company, one of the least data-driven companies I've worked at (where the CEO cares more about UX than about analytics and correct data reporting)
EGOS, EGOS, EGOS
- The CEO is one of the most egomaniacal people I've ever worked with. He continues to dictate everyone's roadmap despite him PERSONALLY hiring and approving product hires.
- There is too much emphasis on "being cool" and being perceived as a "cool, hip company," rather than actual business/financial results. Too much obsession with external façade and image, rather than substance (i.e., revenue and profit).
- Some people at the company are only working there because they want to make connections with the EDM community, in order to further their own fledgling music careers.
LACK OF ROLE DEFINITION
We have engineers who are product managing. We have product managers who are project managing. We have designers doing user research. We have marketers doing product management. Splice employees (partially due to their lack of tech industry experience) do not know where their roles begin and where their roles end. This creates mass company confusion and a lot of bad faith in each other. Lots of toe-stepping, little forgiveness. Makes for a bad cultural dynamic in which everyone feels like they are being micro-managed by some different team.
INABILITY TO PRIORITIZE
The strategy of this company is not "pick the most opportunistic business targets and go after them with product development, shipping code, and efficiency." Rather, the vast majority of prioritization at Splice can be summed up with: GO AFTER EVERYTHING AT ONCE. You can guess how that type of decision making turns out.
TOO MUCH TALK, NOT ENOUGH WALK
There is a lot of jargon in the company about how we want to change the music industry, particularly among musicians trying to make a living from music production. The mission is indeed admirable, and one of the main reasons why I personally decided to join the company. However, there needs to less fixation on the "brand" of the company and more focus on feature shipping, delivery, and (at the end of the day) BETTER SOFTWARE. Make features that work well, track clean data, be committed to making them as bug-free and easy to use as possible, and the users will come. No brand book or new logo will be able to grow a company
