Pros
The people are amazing to work with almost across the board. The project/product manages were some of the best I’ve ever worked with. While the batting average is 250 in most places the standard at Smartsheet is 500 in terms of performance, professional & personal collaboration and the desire for us all to succeed. Solid product I was proud to own publicly with a strong focus on the customer. Customer impact was often discussed and always considered before new features, update or fixes were undertaken or deployed.
Cons
Holding onto some of the tools, organizational thinking and backend priorities from it’s start up days in 2005. Pushing to adopt industry standard changes can be challenging. An ongoing loss of quality people due to multiple re-orgs that were abrupt, poorly communicated, poorly executed without being fully thought through, (created the need for addition re-orgs). These impacted the corporate culture and morale across the engineering originations, but left the challenges mentioned above unchanged.