Leadership desperately needs to align (and want to be leadership)
Pros
Got to see cool product pictures featuring adorable puppies on the regular, the Product team itself was full of incredibly genuine, supportive people.
Cons
Senior leadership has a unique mix of problems: there are leaders that are incredibly unequipped, leaders that appear to genuinely not want the role, and leaders that are competent and talented whose voices get drowned out. It's incredibly hard to drive a company in any sort of direction, much less a successful one, when product meetings with leadership turn into ego-measuring battles with, arguably, some of the most crucial leaders remaining silent during the debate. The company follows "conscious leadership" apparently, which is something I never witnessed in action. Instead, leadership (especially within engineering and upper leadership) would often be combative, petty, or immediately pull rank -- in one instance, in a group Slack channel, I had a leader call me out despite not reading the related documentation or tickets (therefore not understanding the full situation). When I tried to express a serious concern to upper leadership, the response was that I was using the term "decision rights" incorrectly and that we would "do a workshop" and there was no regard for the actual issue I raised: that no one understood who got to actually have final say on a topic (which, per "conscious leadership" is not "decision rights"). Much of the company seems to want to have final say on a topic without wanting any of the consequences of being the decision maker; that is, something as simple as updating a line of copy would involve a chain of approvals that would rival that of a massive organization, without any clarity on who truly was the important approver. There were never moments of, "this needs to get done, I'll handle any fallout, this is the decision that is going out the door" -- a mindset that, frankly, is key for startups to grow. If tickets weren't written following the exact template (down to having headers that were bolded and in certain colors), that was a problem; it was not a problem when stakeholders bypassed product entirely and requested features from engineering, resulting in double work or work that directly interfered with each other.
