Pros
- The colleagues within the working teams are really nice, there is a lot respect and collaboration between the teams. They are the reason for success by actually bringing live some things and making success - The business model is figured out which is a big thing for a company. The company is generating a lot of revenue that unfortunately isnt used to pay well but at least the company is not going bankrupt - HR is doing a decent job. It went from non-existent to existent in the last year which is nice to see. Couldnt have been worse and there is a lot to clean up but the HR team does the basic tasks well
Kontras
- The Chief Product Officer is always friendly to your face and can use buzzwords and fancy sentences to mask that she has no idea what she should be doing. People who know more than her or who are well respected she slowly isolates within the company. She has no vision, asks product teams for roadmaps, scrutinizes each useless detail and after 1 month comes with high priority projects that completely block the roadmap. She promotes, recognizes and praises employees who she likes or things she understands and lets others work hard to then blame them for not working on ideas she has. She has no idea how to lead multiple teams, attempts improvements without seeing things through, only gives minimal raises to people she likes, does not work on anything that helps the teams but instead pushes through so many topics that teams are completely confused and do not trust that anything is ever going to get finished. She holds back many great employees and successes were there despite her, not because of her. - The Chief Technology Officer means things well but lacks the experience or mentor to put in place a good engineering organization. He has gotten many chances but after many years the engineering organization has not delivered much meaningfull that is still in use. Teams are reshuffled all the team, there is a huge fluctuation and no standardization. He does not know what a CTO should actually focus on, is busy with mingling in high priority projects instead of enabling a team to shine. He is contradicting himself all the team, has short term vision that changes each 3 months and does not listen to more senior people within his team to built up a good engineering platform with some good working best practices. - The company has visions but no plans how to reach these visions. That means that each slogan, 10x better, no back-office, etc. is being interpreted by all teams differently. And the teams just work without any alignment till another new slogan is introduced. - The salary and stock options are very low. They are maybe decent for Berlin market when compared to other German startups in Series A or B but are not interesting for global talent who really wants to make a difference. In the last 2 years salary raises were either frozen or upon exception despite the company makes a lot of revenue. That is an absolute shame, many employees working hard but get no financial reward from it. Stock options are very low in comparison to UK or US startups. - There are so many software applications in use. Each department uses again their own things. At 1 point there were 3 digital signature tools in use. Getting access to these software applications is finally getting centralized but are not part of a standard profile for all employees. This leads to often reusing other peoples passwords and always a shortage of user licenses. The security team is extremely paranoid so the software applications you get access to require very complicated passwords, VPNs that are half working and multi-factor authentication which make them very difficult to work with. - The processes are not written down, lots of things are decided within chat threads or not at all. This means no one really knows how things work, who is responsible for things. As a remedy they are creating teams that document processes in a specialized risk tool that is already outdated the moment the processes are in. Instead of looking at how other companies do this or asking more senior members, vague instructions are given to document everything without a good framework. With many people leaving and new people joining you often hear: I have no idea how it works, who is responsible for it and who should make the decision. It will take months and years to rebuilt this trust. - HR is mainly there to please the C-level and higher management. This means that if you cant get along with someone within the higher management, you are marked as not fitting to the company culture by HR. You have very little possibility to do anything against it and all things you point out will always end up with the management again for approval.