DEI Trojan Horse. Diversity here is for marketing purposes only - Senior Product Manager Nava Employee Review

NAVA builds software. As an African American with 30 years of experience in software development and degrees in engineering, and business (MBA), I felt my background as an engineer and consultant on numerous government contracts was an almost ideal match. However this was the most disappointing, hostile work environment I've experienced in my career. I faced both raw racism and ageism at Nava. Per Nava’s web site, you’ll notice the absence of African American product managers on the product team. As of the writing of this review, there are no African American men on this team in particular. This should have been a red flag that I ignored being too excited to join what I thought was a young vibrant organization. Nava is clever in cherry picking a few African American executives and they make sure they are front and center in their marketing materials, noting the percentage of African Americans, but in actuality this is less than 5 or so people. For an organization of 300 or so, founded by two men of Asian descent, 80% of their team leaders are white. This fact was on their website for their 2021 and 2022 demographic surveys, but has been removed recently because it skews so heavily white and continues to do so. At an all hands meeting in 2022 upon the surveys release, management acknowledged the ‘team leadership’ numbers were misaligned with their values and cited it as an area of concern. However they soon stopped using the ‘team leader’ metric in the most recent 2023 survey thus sweeping their concerns under the rug. Speaking bluntly, management at Nava clearly wants white faces in front of its clients. This desire is culture, intent, and design and something you’ll soon discover after joining. From the instant I joined the organization I was being observed by my fellow employees that I found out were reporting my activity directly to my manager who never observed my work on any occasion. My manager worked on a completely separate project totally unrelated to mine. She never attended a single meeting I held, nor observed any of my project activity whatsoever, but began interrogating my coworkers 30 days into my job regarding how I was doing. My manager would then take her gathered evidence and confront me with it every Friday afternoon during our ‘weeklys’ and I would spend sometimes two hours defending myself against the negative allegations of my coworkers. There was a clear concerted effort to mischaracterize and outright lie about my job performance after I noted that a white employee was incompetent and failed to complete crucial project activity in a high quality and timely manner. To the degree that the team on one occasion had to call an emergency last minute meeting to fix this coworkers presentation before a large team reorganization meeting so the company would not embarrass itself in front of subcontractors and the client. This same employee excluded me from over 20 meetings that would culminate in the very presentation I referenced and she was assigned to complete but failed to do so. Instead of involving me as the most experienced and educated member of the team, this coworker gave that duty to white employees with less than half my experience, no technical degrees, one of whom reported to me as my junior staff member. I won't go into the circumstances of my separation from the organization, but I will say I was replaced by a white male, approximately half my age, less than half my experience, who majored in history in college. There is one qualification at Nava that will assure your success. Simply stated, if you are young and white, you have no ceiling and no requirement to meet any bar for experience or education. I hate to be this blunt, but they state that they want to “keep it real” here on this review site, so there you are. I highly caution African American employees to take a critical look at this organization and ask questions that dive deeper into their own demographic numbers and the values they claim to espouse. Ask in particular why ‘team leader’ is no longer a part of their yearly demographic survey. A company that wants to be ‘majority minority by 2025’ per their website is the type of virtual signaling and deception that warrants close scrutiny.