A significant portion of the reasons the author outlines are exactly the environment going on at $PreviousJob, except it started a year or two before the pandemic. It’s amazing to read their flags and notice how much of it aligned with the final few years of the nine I spent there.
It’s especially hard when a large company (80-90k employees) can’t see themselves as a conglomerate of smaller businesses that have individual/different cultures, customers and customer needs. The authors list destroyed $PreviousJob (not yet, it’s still there but all the “fruiting trees” that created the magic customers loved are gone. From top to bottom, it’s a shadow of itself in vision, ability and drive. It’s a shame, mostly for the customers.).
The biggest flag I can agree with is when sales timelines force corner cutting or outright premature/possible-unworking/unsustainable software get delivered to customers at outrageous prices all while losing focus on the needs of the core customer base. How can a business ignore the source of 60% of their core customers/fans for three-five years and believe they can recover from that? They can’t.
I know old peers and colleagues will read this and know what I mean. I hope they do, and I hope that my passion for what we were working on and our entire customer base was very obvious for all my time there.
It’s wild that “leaders” are deaf to internal experts who built and grew these smaller orgs into the businesses they are today. I don’t assume me or anyone else has all the answers, or are ever right, it’s the complete objection to suggestions of righting the course towards customers who actually need and want the product that’s wild.
I like to think of it like the Unix philosophy of “small sharp tools”, as our founders believed. Chasing extreme growth is a poison and when it infects giant organ from top to bottom… the issues the author highlights and the ones I experienced lead to these outcomes.
It’s especially hard when a large company (80-90k employees) can’t see themselves as a conglomerate of smaller businesses that have individual/different cultures, customers and customer needs. The authors list destroyed $PreviousJob (not yet, it’s still there but all the “fruiting trees” that created the magic customers loved are gone. From top to bottom, it’s a shadow of itself in vision, ability and drive. It’s a shame, mostly for the customers.).
The biggest flag I can agree with is when sales timelines force corner cutting or outright premature/possible-unworking/unsustainable software get delivered to customers at outrageous prices all while losing focus on the needs of the core customer base. How can a business ignore the source of 60% of their core customers/fans for three-five years and believe they can recover from that? They can’t.
I know old peers and colleagues will read this and know what I mean. I hope they do, and I hope that my passion for what we were working on and our entire customer base was very obvious for all my time there.
It’s wild that “leaders” are deaf to internal experts who built and grew these smaller orgs into the businesses they are today. I don’t assume me or anyone else has all the answers, or are ever right, it’s the complete objection to suggestions of righting the course towards customers who actually need and want the product that’s wild.
I like to think of it like the Unix philosophy of “small sharp tools”, as our founders believed. Chasing extreme growth is a poison and when it infects giant organ from top to bottom… the issues the author highlights and the ones I experienced lead to these outcomes.
This is why companies/products die.