Phorest Salon Software Reviews

This role is presented as a senior, cross-functional, hands-on position. In practice, it operates with significant structural gaps, limited organisational backing and misaligned performance evaluations. Senior developers and middle managers created an environment of constant intimidation, hostility, and blame that had a serious impact on my mental health and left me dealing with long-term stress and symptoms consistent with PTSD. Key points to consider: Unsupported cross-functional design: The role interfaces across customer support, product, engineering, and operations but reports into management structures that do not fully oversee or understand customer-facing frameworks. As a result, the true workload and business risk carried by the role are largely invisible at leadership level. Responsibility without effective influence: The role requires enforcing product and development decisions in real-life scenarios, yet feedback from application support and other customer-facing teams is not consistently incorporated into upstream decision-making, even when it highlights clear production gaps. This creates a recurring rift between what is built and what is realistically operable. Overlapping responsibilities without resourcing safeguards: The role combines real-time incident handling, operational risk mitigation, internal tooling ownership, data operations, regional coordination, and constant cross-team intervention. These responsibilities are not matched by capacity planning, workload constraints, or sustainable staffing models. Misaligned performance evaluation: Although the role is operational, cross-functional, and non-developmental in nature, performance is assessed through engineering-driven targets that do not reflect its actual scope, accountability, or commercial risk exposure, creating a persistent disconnect between effort and recognition. Limited organizational visibility: Specialized support and operational continuity work receives minimal formal visibility, even during periods of sustained high operational demand or company-wide events. Sustained overload caused by fragmented inputs: The role routinely absorbs simultaneous demands from product, development, global support teams, and payment operations. The constant context-switching, the lack of a unified escalation channel, and the absence of a single source of truth create a level of mental and operational overhead that is not acknowledged or supported by the existing structure. Hostile collaboration patterns within parts of the senior technical layer: Interaction with certain senior technical stakeholders was consistently marked by dismissiveness, overt hostility, and adversarial conduct, independent of any specific operational context. This created a discouraging and abrasive working environment that added significant friction to an already complex cross-functional role. Management response to structural concerns: Structural and workload concerns raised through appropriate channels were addressed through minimization rather than corrective action, contributing to a breakdown of trust in management processes.

While the company is incredibly supportive of staff advancing their careers, the current challenge is the lack of a structured career path or 'road map.' At the moment, growth feels a bit more organic than defined. I’m hopeful that a formal career development framework will be implemented soon to help employees visualise their long-term future here