Pros
Few people in Product seemed nice, had experience working in tech. Some very talented engineers. Free Zoom Wednesdays. Quick action on Covid and generally working was flexible.
Cons
Too many ‘Managers’, not enough Doers. Executives having no vision, no idea on what were they doing, no goals, no plans for monetisation. The main goal was to build something ‘fashiony’ which couldn’t be translated as a real metric. CEO previously worked in fashion and hired Art Directors working closely with Product which couldn’t understand how building an app is different than designing a magazine and mostly waterfalling Product with work not delivered on time or simply because their work was impossible to translate in UI. It was very difficult to feedback to the them as the answers were “You don’t understand fashion, you are not creative” Toxic culture, as CEO slowly surrounded with people who couldn’t say “No’ to her, and talented people either left the company, or have been sacked for ‘various’ reasons. Some believed had power into bully others around as most of the time inexperienced ones believe they need to compensate somehow for their lack of knowledge. Lots and lots and lots of meetings around, with no purpose, no agenda, especially in Product. Everything was changing overnight, in 2 to 3 months stakeholders changed direction so many times you could hardly tell what you’ll do tomorrow. Teams were jumping from one project to another on weekly basis, it was hard to achieve that “team knowledge”. The biggest challenges for UX Designers were things such as ‘Add glitter’ and ‘Shine’ and ‘Jumpy Buttons’ which suddenly become the only way to achieve great ‘conversion rates’. It was decided that 4-5 weekly reviews for Designers is the way to do things - where everybody had a saying in how to design except designers and the scrambled general feedback was then dictated by the CPO which also had a very “thorough” and “detailed” vision of how things should work, look and feel. CPO also line-managed the Design Team as the Head of Design was sacked for not delivering some icons(?). In fact she managed the Design Team for 5 months so well - that at the end of these 5 months literally all designers either left or have been sacked for not being able to cope with her fruitful demands. Typical 121s were “I’ll show up 15 mins late and tell you what I want you do do - you’ll just listen and agree” Drest was by far the worst experience I’ve ever been through, a circus.
