Pros
Wider team is competent, helpful and friendly. Very positive vibes in the office. People are considerate of each other, and generally very supportive. Product is pretty solid as well, with good opportunities to scale and automate.
Cons
After a week of joining, the manager started doubting my competence everytime my approach differed from his thought process. He also kept talking negatively about the engineering team and leadership's approach towards product. When I asked for some idea of what success looks like, manager said we don't work like that here and you can go somewhere else if you want to work in a place like that. I wasn't assigned any real product work (just a couple of very poorly executed tasks were handed over mid way, with no clarity on what were they trying to achieve). Manager refused to handover the ongoing projects, which cut me off from rest of the team since we were not working on anything common. For the rest of the month, he just kept looking for mistakes, making a huge deal out of any little slip that happened. I was walking on eggshells throughout my time there. At the end of first month I was asked to go. Leadership didn't try to know my side of the story before making the decision. If you are a solid Product Manager, I would strongly advice against joining the product team at Driva at the moment, unless you want to risk your reputation and career. In my limited time there, my assessment is that the manager doesn't seem to get b2c product management and has some serious limitations in communication, stakeholder management and people management. I got the sense that he doesn't see any value in understanding perspectives of others and probably feels that everyone is beneath him in competence. He seems really smart and kind in first few conversations, but a completely different side emerges once disagreements happen. What he says and what he actually means are often two completely different things, and you have to do a lot of guesswork to understand what he really wants.
