Board Intelligence Reviews

4.3

76% would recommend to a friend

(59 total reviews)

Pippa Begg

100% approve of CEO

79% positive business outlook

Board Intelligence has an employee rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on 59 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Board Intelligence employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

59 reviews
1.0
29 Sept 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The company is growing, and the new hires have good skills and are pleasant to work with. The salary is good.

Cons

Senior management have very limited experience outside Board Intelligence, and this has blinded them to modern software development and people management practices. Many below them have tried to improve things, though the furthest they’ve managed to get is to sprinkle some agile terms into our processes. I regularly see aggressive, dominating behaviours from senior management and I’ve seen people treated harshly for voicing their opinions. The lack of compassionate leadership has also made daily development gruelling. Every sprint at least doubles in size from what was committed. The majority of my work is firefighting bugs and system crashes. Since we make large, slow releases and rely almost entirely on manual testing across many configurations without appropriate release management tools, we are always behind and under high pressure. The priority is consistently to churn out poorly thought out features rather than consider the future or improve the infrastructure. There are no useful learning opportunities.

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Board Intelligence Response
4y
Hearing that we have missed the mark weighs heavily on me. I am sorry for what you’ve experienced and I hope that we can turn that around for you. I am committed to doing my best to make it so. We set this business up to both change conversations for the better in boardrooms around the world and to build a business with a special kind of culture, one based on kindness and compassion. Both of these goals are equally held, and making this a reality for you is vitally important to me. We have a wide range of activities in place to actively listen on a monthly and a quarterly basis to how each member of the team is feeling and to canvas improvement ideas. And we participate as a whole company in the prioritisation and planning processes that determine what does and doesn’t get done. Clearly we need to continue to improve and I would seek your help with this. If you have ideas for how we can do better or you have seen something specific than concerns you and if you don’t feel comfortable raising it in person, then please do make use of the anonymous channel we provide. We always appreciate the feedback and we will always listen and do our best to improve and to tackle important issues head on. I hope we can work together, to build the business that you deserve. Jen Sundberg, Co-CEO
1.0
14 Jan 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Competitive salary, good equipment and offices. Passionate CEOs that will take time to talk to you.

Cons

Board Intelligence are trying to be more product led. However, with senior management literally saying "Don't listen to the customers, I'll tell you your priorities", they have a long way to go culturally. They also have empowerment issues, I felt micro-manged as my manager wanted to design each feature in detail and routinely overrode me, the UX lead and account managers. I was largely limited to managing meetings, coordinating internal communications and reporting progress. Despite this, I was keen to adapt to the company, prove myself and gain more responsibilities. I arranged regular check-ins with my manager to help me align with the company's expectations. He agreed this was the best way forward, though didn't turn up to the sessions, leaving me waiting in an empty meeting 15 different times. He eventually turned up to one and gave me exceptional feedback, saying my efforts were "perfect". However, the next working day, Board Intelligence abruptly fired me without explaining why or giving me a chance to resolve their concerns. I was later told that the reasons were: 1) I had cancelled a customer meeting, which annoyed the customer. I didn't want to do this, though my manager instructed me to do it and I wanted to show I was a team player. 2) I had approved the UX lead's designs, whereas my manager envisioned a different design. I conclude that this is not a place to grow as a product manager.

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Board Intelligence Response
4y
I know we only worked together for a few weeks but I sense that we share a common view of what good looks like and I am sure you will go on to achieve great things in your career. You make a valid point of the importance of listening to our clients and I couldn't agree more. We have never been a tech company, looking for a problem to solve. We began as specialists in board effectiveness - consultants who spent hours each week inside our clients boardrooms (which we do still, to this day) - and we went looking for innovative and better ways to solve our client's problems, which led us to technology. Our product team maintain deep relationships with our clients and intimacy with their challenges remains at the heart of our approach. Our NPS programme, the work that we do to measure impact and the events that we host each month with our clients for deeper discovery, are just some of the ways in which we are bringing ever more rigour to our approach. But we will always seek to do more and better. We will continue to reflect on the points you have raised and will challenge ourselves to improve. I am sorry things didn't work out at Board Intelligence and we hope the next chapter of your career will bring you fulfilment. Best wishes, Jen
3.0
27 Oct 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I had a great time at BI, I worked in an a great marketing team and my first manager really looked after us. The ceos are great, and really caring.

Cons

The company isn’t exactly what I’d call diverse, there were a lot of people from similar backgrounds there, and if you didn’t fit within the demographic you were on the outside. Several times during my tenure I heard ‘oh the Essex girl’ not a term I find particularly offensive, but still it’s not nice to hear. I had four managers over a space of 13 months, which meant my progression plans were never really followed up on. I was asked several times ‘is your baby planned’ when I fell pregnant which I found truly offensive, just as it wasn’t the norm, alongside this the maternity policy is truly poor. My biggest issue and my main reason for leaving was progression, they’re not keen on promoting internally but then are shocked when you leave for a higher role.

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Board Intelligence Response
3y
Thanks for leaving your feedback. Firstly, I want to unreservedly apologise for the questions you received about your pregnancy. I consider us to be highly inclusive and supportive of families of all shapes and sizes, and it doesn’t make me proud that that’s something you experienced while you worked at BI. We are a passionately family friendly firm which is why when we launched our Maternity Policy it was upper quartile according to all of the relevant benchmarks we could find. But we don’t believe that is the right benchmark to strive for and so we’re reviewing our Parental Leave policies to raise the bar still higher and we hope to launch this before the end of the year. We’ve always taken the progress of our colleagues seriously, but this year our marquee People project has been to roll out Career Development Pathways – clear career structures – to allow our people to manage their careers in a more transparent way. We’ve seen many success stories in our home-grown talent over the years, and as we grow we hope this new approach will help us to scale that. We strive to build a diverse team in the fullest sense and we analyse this closely with anonymous company-wide surveys each year, to track gender, ethnicity, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation and socio-economic backgrounds amongst other things. We are proud to be well ahead of the national average across the majority of these measures both at management level and in the company at large, but we are far from complacent and our Inclusion & Diversity team alongside our leadership team, our Co-CEOs and myself, are passionately committed to doing more to create more fairness and opportunity. If you’d like to talk, please do reach out to me. The issue that you’ve raised are things we care deeply about and I will always be glad to take your call and to discuss how we do better in the future.
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Glassdoor has 65 Board Intelligence reviews submitted anonymously by Board Intelligence employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Board Intelligence is right for you.