Many senior departures - Senior Product Manager Karat Employee Review

2.0
8 Aug 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

flex work policy Can basically do your own thing (as long as you work for one of the founders) Progressive in terms of DE&I

Cons

1. Many…many departures at a senior+ level across all functions 2. They refuse to give out titles. You won’t grow your title if you come here and they’ll use that to keep control over you 3. The founders are inexperienced (just look at LI) 4. One of the founders has been moved into a individual, slightly siloed role because he can’t work with and get along with people! 5. Somehow all of the less than stellar reviews have been pushed to the bottom, makes you wonder why they have to work so hard to cover up the true issues behind the org

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Karat Response
4y
Thank you for sharing your feedback with us. I appreciate you highlighting our diversity and inclusion efforts, as well as your experience of work/life balance here. One of our core values is “human-centered” and so as we continue to grow, we appreciate this moment to reflect on our strength and development areas. Supporting our team’s growth is of utmost importance to every manager and leader at Karat. In 2021, a core area of focus has been building and implementing performance development processes, guides, and trainings to support every Karateer. In the 1H 2021 cycle, we are proud we saw 22%+ of employees receive promotions. As our company expands, we're introducing new roles and opportunities within Karat, allowing each individual the opportunity to grow deeper in their respective craft. Our team is on track to double in size in 2021. With that, building a strong leadership team has been a core focus. Since Q4 2020, our leadership team has grown 2x with the addition of our SVP of Engineering, Head of Global Solutions and Support, VP of Delivery, Head of Legal, VP of People & Culture, and our future hires of a VP of Product, and more. Three of these senior hires are womxn; prioritizing inclusivity in our hiring practices to ensure a strong, diverse leadership team is, and always will be, a top priority. We value the time you took to give feedback, and for providing us the space to respond here as well. Whether in person or anonymously, I hope you, our candidates, and Karateers (current and alum) continue to share how we can keep getting better together. I really believe our possibilities are endless, and am grateful you are a part of this journey. Cheers! Meilene

Explore other reviews about Karat

5.0
11 June 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

collaboration leadership mission driven work-life balance

Cons

lack of open-minded team members

3.0
27 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Wonderful manager and teammates Friendly vibe. people want to help and learn and improve. Lots of passion for the product, for inclusion, for their team. Benefits weren't bad. You got a monthly stipend to spend on anything, just link it to your card and it automatically reimbursed you for $150. They had one medical and gym discounts. Good work life balance too, people rarely worked overtime except for when we were oncall.

Cons

Team events were fun and hype for the first year I was there. The second year we got budget constraints and all that went out the window, along with all the talk of inclusion. I had to write code to identify what countries interview engineers were working out of, in order to remove the ones in higher-income countries from the interview matching algorithm so that it could prioritize the IVEs in india. I suppose the existing IVEs who had been working in our platform for years would simply cease to get additional interviews. Also it was a startup and there were many growing pains from the days it was founded, like hardcoded strings and numbers in crucial files that were written back in 2016 but you just have to know because you cannot go back and refactor it all. The janky way we had to just talk to the right person to get this information was worrying. Documentation was also not fantastic, lots of tribal knowledge on teams and oncall required tons of repetition to convey information that should've been written down in the docs The HR industry is just full of karens and some of our team events were cringe af. We'd go into breakout rooms to discuss our favorite book and straight up everyone in my room said harry potter. It doesn't get more basic lol I think that was a sign of hard times to come because after we implemented that, we were kept on hold without a project for nearly a month before my whole team were let go in layoffs. I don't want to do tech anymore because of this

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