The problem with Leanplum, like most things, starts from the top. Initially, the CEO and the other co-founder (who used to be the CTO) ran the company and were fairly hands on and involved with the product and the company. The ex-CTO is an extremely smart guy who is actually very, very nice and as far as most of us can tell, genuinely cares about Leanplum and the employees. The CEO is a young engineer who has had one job prior to starting Leanplum. He's never led anyone and at first seemingly was willing to listen to more experienced colleagues/mentors. At some point, his ego got in the way and the company kept making terrible product decisions with very little care about what the customers wanted or needed. The commonly used phrase of "no politics" was no longer lived out by example - if anything, everything was becoming more and more political.
We dropped delivery after delivery of new features while the current product continued to burn. Imagine a boat with holes that is slowly filling with water; instead of taking the boat out of water and fixing the holes, we used duct tape to patch the holes and 0.6L Camelback water bottles to remove as much water as possible from the sinking boat.
So now you have a crumbling culture, a broken product, and extremely happy customers who ask for refunds, re-sign with smaller contracts and/or move off of Leanplum all together. What would you do at this point? Why not hire a leader from a large company who sees employees as numbers and one of the least personable people you would ever meet? What's even better? She is proud of the fact that she enjoys firing people. They then hire a new CPO who is a seemingly nice, capable person who essentially gave up on Leanplum about 6 months in. The new head of product is also extremely overwhelmed and will likely leave.
The company lied about how much money they had left in the bank and is now scrambling to keep the lights on. Their largest customer left (the leadership tried to somehow spin that as a positive) and it is a matter of time when their next group of large clients cut off Leanplum. The layoffs were obviously not a fun experience, but the CEO was a coward during the latest round. He made a quick announcement and then hopped in his electric car and jetted home while HIS employees are crying. Luckily the former CTO and a handful of other leaders had the sense (and heart) to stick around and do their best to console people who just lost their jobs. If you are looking to join Leanplum, PLEASE PLEASE reconsider - many of the people who were laid off had recently joined Leanplum.
One last thing - it's sad that the leadership team is asking the few "lucky" employees who got to keep their jobs to come on Glassdoor and a. write positive reviews and b. attack people who LOST THEIR JOBS! Of course they are disgruntled, but these are the people who built an amazing culture and tried to build an amazing product. It's rarely one person's fault, and I'm sure some of the employees who were let go were not doing a great job, but let's not pretend like the "leaders" had nothing to do with the demise of Leanplum.
