The Golden Age is Over - Anonymous employee ProductPlan Employee Review

There was a time when I advocated strongly for any high performing startup lover to consider joining ProductPlan. Heck, I even played a big part in hiring for my department, and enthusiastically recruited people from my network. Those days are long gone. With the Bow River acquisition of the company in 2022, the downhill slide began almost immediately and gained STARTLING momentum. What had taken years to build from scratch as a boostrapped and scrappy team -- a high performing culture, trust and safety in failure, transparency and ownership in leadership, real profit and runway -- their legion of executives ham-handedly dismantled in a matter of months. Ever since, the company has been *hemorrhaging* senior talent, including almost the entirety of the early and founding team, who had been with the company through thick and thin and through MUCH harder financial times. There have been repeated rounds of layoffs (three in a just over a year, I believe), cutting truly talented humans. Fairly inexperienced individuals are being seemingly elevated via lofty titles, under the guise of being invested in/being given a chance, only to be excluded from actual decision making processes and simply told what to do with their department or project. Their entire teams are being let go, with no backfills in sight, and they are expected to perform the duties of multiple disparate job functions while being compensated around the median rate for a given role. The executive team will ask a department to rally around a hiring plan and spend weeks or even months interviewing, hiring, and onboarding new talent in order to increase capacity -- only to lay off ALL of the new contributors in the next quarter. This disconnect between company performance and poor decision making around how/where to spend organizational effort and time, is perplexing almost to the point of tragedy. The lack of response to this direct feedback (or worse, targeting those who give this type of feedback for layoff) is unnerving. This is not a place to plan on building your career and my hope is that those on the existing team are dusting off their resumes and making contingency plans.