Reactive culture, celebrated burnout, and a lack of scaling strategy - Anonymous employee Spare Labs Employee Review

Operational Chaos & Strategic Whiplash: Spare is stuck in a state of constant firefighting. In CS, leadership announced a transition to a more strategic model, but provided zero enablement on new frameworks, and made zero structural changes to set the team up for success. Management essentially declared a new direction overnight and expected a miraculous transition with no internal alignment, leaving CSMs stuck as a reactive support dumping ground for other departments, while trying to find time for "strategic activities." Laid off the majority of the team 5 months later. Inexperienced Leadership & Burnout: some departments have lacked seasoned SaaS leadership at the director level for far too long, relying heavily on internal promotions of individuals with no SaaS experience elsewhere. Instead of building sustainable frameworks and an overall strategy, leadership heavily rewards a "work all hours of the night" mentality. Glorifying burnout is used as a band-aid to cover up severe operational inefficiencies, resulting in zero work-life balance. Performative Feedback Culture: While HR ran an employee engagement survey and transparently shared the company-wide results (thanks, HR!), the departmental execution was purely performative. Teams were promised individual debrief sessions with managers and department leads to address the data. Months later, these commitments were completely ignored by leadership and team leads and swept under the rug. When pushed to take concrete action, leadership goes silent.