Your choice - werkgeversreview Anonieme werknemer bij Climate

It’s difficult to paint a large organization with a single brush. There are some good, competent, people at Climate, and some great teams. There are product managers who are professional and have a deep need to understand their customers. This review is about the senior management and the organization as a whole, not about the rank and file, who really do want to make this work. If you’re considering a PM role at Climate, a stark way to break it down might be think of what type of PM you’re looking to be. Say the world divides into two types of PMs: Type 1: You like to show up to work, clock in 9-5, get paid pretty good money, tell your friends and spouse a nice story about how you work with farmers. You like good snacks in the kitchen. You can keep an engineering team mostly on the rails, but don’t really want to be bothered with the details of implementation. You don’t care a ton about design or about spending time to get to know your customers, especially if it’s not rewarded. You enjoy the security of never being held to account for how good your product is. You’re not too bothered by shipping product on extremely delayed schedules due to management’s constantly changing its mind or its habit of not holding teams to account. You’re just not going to be bothered to build a great product because the organization can’t seem to recognize or find greatness – this is just a job. Type 2: You’re passionate about shipping great product and building a great team. You want to learn skills from people around you. You aren’t in it for the snacks. If Type 1 resonates more with you, Climate is likely a great fit. If Type 2 resonates more, there might be other, better places to spend your life. So why such a stark choice? Climate’s issues stem from two major flaws: The first is that the original startup was hollow from the beginning. It was a pipe-dream of a company that never had a commercially successful product and got lucky with the Monsanto acquisition. The original management from that startup is still largely in place and has learned and matured very little. More important, the culture – of non-delivery, of never focusing, of zero accountability, of conflict-avoidance – is still there. As stated earlier, there are individually good people and good teams, but they are overwhelmed by poor direction and worse culture. The second flaw is that the executives from the parent company, Monsanto, have little idea how to run a software company, and have no inclination to learn how. They want to play company and want visit their shiny toy in San Francisco via corporate jet. They come from a world where they understand corn seed sales very well, but they don’t want to do the hard work of understanding and managing a software company. They don’t ask critical questions or critical follow-up questions. They don’t roll up their sleeves and sit with teams. They conflate their knowledge of farmers with knowledge of what good software is and how to build it. They make classic software mistakes like cutting pricing in half midway through the sales season. They don’t put in place product and engineering executives who can build good software (see flaw 1). When the occasional good person with a vision comes along, they sit by as that person gets fired or quits. The world is full of solid, interesting companies with a chance of success. It’s not clear that Climate is one of them. Candidates for jobs at Climate should think hard and ask serious questions that dig into whether the company will be a successful, happy place for them to land.