*Leadership*
Leadership continuously pushes panic buttons and overreacts to issues with swift and vacuous decisions that derail progress, create misalignment, and cause churn amongst the organization. They've always acted with emotion and were short-sighted, focusing on quarterly gains over longer term vision and strategy. This ensured that our outlook was always uncertain.
*Poor planning and misalignment*
Top-down directives are ambiguous and the misalignment between leadership and management/ICs is very stark, particularly in our objectives and expectations of us. Leadership say and do things in one silo, while we do something else in another and folks working near the bottom get the blame for not delivering what's expected from leadership, when really expectations were not set/shared to begin with. Timelines are ambiguous, roadmap planning takes 3 months, and there's no clear, consistent process in determining what we need to work on and why.
*Priorities in the wrong place*
Turo is the most risk-adverse and conversion-focused organization I've ever been a part of and maybe ever will. Almost every one of our objectives stem from getting customers to pay for our service over actually addressing and improving said service. Our very business model depends on people entrusting other people with their vehicles for travel, and it's insane to me that we deeply focus on receiving their payment over actually improving said model. The result of this is exponential customer churn and eroding brand trust, and leadership is blind in seeing that.
*Zero innovation*
Last and certainly not least is Turo has no room nor interest in innovative thinking. Every "vision" project I've led or been a part of never saw the light of day due to either leadership's disinterest in it or ever shifting priorities/objectives quarter-to-quarter. Leadership is inherently afraid of new products and ways of thinking because they see it as a risk over an opportunity, so their feedback becomes extra pointed and "hand-wave-y". But God-forbid if a button isn't working or we're using the wrong header color in an email...
