Pros
Genuine flexibility around remote working, which I valued. The company also has capable, competent people at junior and mid level, and they are the only reason it functions at all.
Cons
The defining problem at this company is a CEO and senior leadership team (SLT) that are, in my experience, simply not competent to run it. Strong, capable people at junior and mid level are consistently overlooked, underused, and underpaid, while decisions are made by a CEO and SLT who repeatedly demonstrated poor judgement. Time and again I watched leadership make irrational calls, fail to take ownership of the results, and then look downwards for someone to blame. Performance in any business is set from the top. At this company the top is the problem, and the SLT has never been willing to see that. The mismanagement showed up everywhere I looked. Product and engineering were led without, as far as I could tell, any clear product strategy or roadmap, which left the sales team trying to sell something that had never been properly defined. The product underperformed, and that underperformance was reframed as a sales failure rather than the leadership failure it actually was. Money was handled just as poorly. Paid advertising spend appeared to run completely unchecked, and expensive external consultants were repeatedly brought in to recommend systems that were not fit for purpose, burning through significant sums with nothing useful to show for it. In my experience this is not what competent financial stewardship looks like. The human cost was the worst part. There was a constant culture of fear and mistrust, sustained by repeated rounds of redundancies that were treated as the answer to underperformance the CEO and SLT had themselves created. The company has lost a great many genuinely able people this way, and at no point did senior leadership appear capable of recognising that the problem sat with them and not with the teams doing the work. HR offered no real route to challenge any of this. In my experience, raising a grievance did not lead to being heard. If anything, it felt as though speaking up put your own position at risk. The pattern underneath all of it is the same. A CEO and SLT who, in my experience, are out of their depth, unwilling to take responsibility, and quick to manage out capable people rather than confront their own shortcomings.
