Pros
Start-up feel in large company Relatively young staff with energy and eagerness to prove themselves Team building efforts (forces and a big vapid)
Cons
- young kids managed by older and out of touch leaders - generally the industry B-team filled with people who aren’t ready for prime time yet if any of them manage to get there, they are hired away instantly. - People are constantly leaving in the middle of projects and it is very hard to get anything done without hitting road blocks and insecure managers - As one external client said “BigCommece punches above its wight in bureaucracy”. This really sums it up. It is only 1100 or so employees but they have not matured properly after the IPO. They put in tons of processes that put even the largest corporations to shame. And it slows down everything you do. Furthermore, each team or department has KPIs that conflict with each other which results in a very siloed and competitive work environment. It is a strange place because you can tell that almost everyone there is a “good person” but they are being pushed to compete in an unnatural way. The worst part is that the clients or users are suffering because the product (platform) is not made with the client in mind, despite the CEO’s blind belief that this is what his company is doing. Everyone is focused on hitting their numbers which means growing existing merchant GMV but that means they are not incentivized to build new channel partnerships or tools for their merchants to use unless those partners support them financially. And when a partner isn’t willing to “support them” because, let’s face it, the company is not exactly the strongest platform in the market, then they don’t build the solution that merchants need. But the worst part of BigCommerce was discovered upon my departure. It goes back to the strange dichotomy between being a mid-sized company with a large size bureaucracy yet stacked with very immature and fearful managers. They do not know how to mentor or grow staff and when you leave, they don’t see you as a human they see you as something that threatens their ability to hit their numbers and they need you gone asap.
