Pros
Cool product; smart, friendly team members
Cons
Rigid in-office requirements (that frequently change); extreme micromanagement; leadership doesn’t value employees; stressful, toxic work environment First of all, the CEO does not seem to be up to the challenge of shepherding the company through a down market. He seems to be panicking, spiraling even, and his response to the economic challenges is to blame his employees and treat them with distrust. It could not be clearer that the CEO does not trust his employees. He has publicly stated his belief that people cannot be trusted to do their work in a remote setting. Now, all new employees have to work in the office 5 days a week for their first 6 months, after which they must be in the office 3 days a week (or 4, if they’re a manager), with no flexibility as to which days they come in. The policy that you only need to come into the office 2 days a week after you’ve been at the company for 18 months was rescinded mid-2023, with all employees being required to come into the office 3 days a week. Not long after this policy was enacted, it was announced with very short notice that GTM had to be in the office the last week of every quarter, which is so counterintuitive. If you’re trying to close deals and really hunker down to end out a quarter well, the last thing you need is a commute every day, and the distraction of working on a crowded floor. In my opinion, these policies are designed to assuage the anxiety of the CEO, not to actually boost productivity. And local leaders are not free to adjust policies to the unique needs of their employees. It’s one rigid policy across countries and cultures. The message being sent to employees is that they are lucky to work at Similarweb and that they have no leverage to ask for policies that will make their lives easier. People structured their lives around the fixed schedule they were given, and were then left scrambling when it changed, and changed again. Living arrangements, custody arrangements - none of these are easy to change once put in place, but everyone is expected to deal with it, with the official explanation being, “If people don’t like it, they’ll leave.” The CEO has stated that it’s an employers’ market, and he doesn’t care if people leave. This attitude towards retaining talent filters down throughout the organization. There is no culture of identifying or nurturing potential. The entire focus is on short-term targets and people are viewed as replaceable widgets. Micromanagement infects all levels of the organization. The CEO has been joining lower level meetings and emailing employees directly about small accounts that churn. This can hardly be an efficient use of his time and focus. In the AM org, the most prevalent forms of micromanagement are: extensive tracking of AM activities, more progress reports/check-ins than necessary, chastising AMs for small mistakes, and scolding AMs for doing something differently than the manager would. These are all classic hallmarks of micromanaging, and are rampant at Similarweb. Instead of being able to focus on the activities that will bring in revenue, AMs spend much of their time logging their activities (often in multiple spreadsheets and platforms) so that their managers can analyze them to improve performance. AMs are also required to plan out their activities in advance and document them so that they can be tracked and analyzed. Despite this extreme level of micromanagement, when results are not what the managers are looking for, the AMs bear 100% of the responsibility. They are told to “be the CEO of their own book of business,” but are not allowed to actually exercise control over how they handle their accounts. Managers hold all the control, but AMs hold all of the blame. All of this micromanaging is to make the managers feel more in control of a situation that they fundamentally cannot control, but the only result is that the AMs are so mired in internal meetings and paperwork that they have even less time to address the challenges that the micromanagers are trying to address, which leads to even more tracking and micromanaging. It’s a vicious cycle of crippling, controlling behavior. If AMs were machines, this approach might work. But they’re not. They’re humans, with brains and feelings and bodies that respond to stress in predictable ways. No one can do their best work when their brains and bodies are flooded with stress hormones, much less for an extended period of time. If you take smart, motivated people, and deny them the chance to take ownership over their work, and instead tear them down, chastise them, and make them feel like a failure, they will become poorer performers, they will be traumatized by the toxicity and abuse, and they will leave. Managing people through blame, fear, and threats is not the best way to motivate them or raise their performance. In one meeting, a manager told their team that if they didn’t improve their performance, they would be placed on PIPs and fired, because why should the company pay them to sit and warm seats? This, despite the fact that performance was down across the company and that barely anyone was meeting quota, despite everyone working really long hours and giving it their all. Even though it’s a tough market for tech SaaS companies in general, it was communicated that this was no excuse. It is the AM’s job to figure out a way to hit quota and if they point out any contextual or mitigating factors affecting their book of business, they are failing to have an “ownership mentality." This, despite the fact that internal data proved that different books of business had differing levels of upsell potential, with quite a wide range between them. Yet, quotas were essentially the same across all books of business and the blame for any gap in reaching quota was laid at the feet of the AM. The gaslighting on this topic was continuous. This blind, non-contextual way of viewing performance showed up in many ways. If a client reached out and dropped a deal in an AM’s lap, the AM received lavish praise for their “performance,” whereas an AM who worked really hard on a deal that then fell through was censured for the result. Only the final result mattered, context was irrelevant, and quantity was valued over quality. If an AM wasn’t hitting their numbers, they MUST be doing something wrong and it was the managers’ mission to find out what that was, with no other factors taken into consideration. In addition, what AMs at Similarweb are required to do as part of their role is extensive: onboardings, trainings, monthlies, QBRs, client engagement, support tickets, data discrepancies, renewal contract negotiations, upsells. There are some recent changes aimed at taking onboarding and support off the AMs plates, but I don’t know how that will translate in reality. There used to be a client success team that supported the AMs, but that team was eliminated in the most recent round of layoffs and restructuring. When you put the ever-increasing amount of tracking spreadsheets AMs have to fill out on a weekly basis, plus an average of 6-8 hours of internal meetings per week, it is both stressful and overwhelming, especially when the AMs are being consistently censured for being low performers and being threatened with performance improvement plans and termination. As for the product, although it’s well designed and has a lot of great features, most clients see it as a “nice-to-have,” not a “need-to-have.” Digital intelligence is only one piece of the puzzle that companies have to put together, and there are some industries that have sources of competitive information that are more meaningful than online traffic. It’s a great product, but when companies have to shorten their tech stack, Similarweb often doesn’t make the cut. Overall, this was the worst corporate experience I’ve ever had. The way I was managed was so frustrating and stressful that it hampered my ability to truly focus on the challenges I faced in my role, which were significant, especially as the economic downtown started hammering my book of business. Instead of receiving support, encouragement, and the freedom to creatively address the challenges I faced, I was scolded, shamed, and threatened, along with the rest of my team. None of this treatment was specific to me, and morale on the entire team has been in the gutter for quite some time. Dedicated workers are being pushed out because they’re failing to meet short-term goals, which then requires that the company expend resources recruiting, hiring, and training new people. But this cycle has been going on for a while. People don’t stay on this team much more than 1.5 years because of how they’re treated, and because it feels like they’re placed in a no-win situation. This way of doing business wastes company resources, places unnecessary stress on workers, and disrupts the relationship the company has with its clients.