ProductPlan Reviews

3.3

53% would recommend to a friend

(47 total reviews)

Steven Cohn

Not enough data to show CEO approval

53% positive business outlook

ProductPlan has an employee rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars, based on 47 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The ProductPlan employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

47 reviews
1.0
20 Mar 2024

Total dumpster fire of a company

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

ProductPlan used to be an okay place to work before we were acquired. Any of the pros of working there are left over from that time. The only real pro is some of the people. There are some really great people still there, although a lot of the people that made ProductPlan great have either been laid off or were lucky enough to leave of their own accord.

Cons

Where to even start? Leadership is inept. The CEO is so tone deaf that it's almost reminiscent of the show the Office, but minus the likability. After several rounds of completely blindsiding layoffs, he uses toxic positivity to try (and fail) at convincing the company that it's a good thing and we should find it exciting to be a smaller workforce. They say the strategy is working, yet there's round after round of layoffs and leadership refuses to take any responsibility for their failures. Seemingly nobody is safe from these layoffs. Top performing employees, employees who have been at the company for many years, employees who have literally won awards quarter after quarter have all been let go. Most of the managers at ProductPlan are also inept. They promote individual contributors to management level positions without any training, there are no skip-level reviews to improve or provide feedbacks to managers. They just coast along in their position unless they, too, get unceremoniously laid off. ProductPlan needs to learn that being good as an Individual contributor does not mean you will magically be good at being a manager for that role. Diversity and inclusion at ProductPlan is a joke. They make every new hire answer a question about what D&I means to them, not realizing how tone deaf it is when almost every one of those people is white and usually male. During the first round of layoffs after acquisition, it seemed like nearly every female in an executive position was laid off and replaced by a white man. ProductPlan consistently underpays, and once you make a reasonable salary close to industry standards you have a target on your back for the layoff. All departments are not treated equally at ProductPlan. Seemingly the entire company minus the engineering department gets flown out to Denver multiple times a year where they have dinners and fun activities. Leadership loves to bring up inside jokes from these get-togethers despite an entire branch of the company never being included in them. They have the money to do those events, but they don't have the money to pay the salaries of loyal employees or to allow engineering to get together as well? I could honestly go on and on about the negatives of working here, but please just know that most of the positive reviews you see here are likely from before we were acquired and are mostly not reflective of the current landscape.

1.0
14 Mar 2024

The Golden Age is Over

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The product solves a real problem and due to the deep investment in the brand in the early years, ProductPlan has a genuine following within the Product community. This makes for enthusiastic customers and great feedback.

Cons

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.

1.0
13 July 2024

The good old days are over (and have been...)

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The people. I've really enjoyed working with the people here, especially in engineering. The company does not seem to realize how lucky it is that so many good folks have stuck around.

Cons

There's a lot at this point... The latest reviews have already gone over some of the cons in some detail. But, basically private equity (Bow River Captial) has completely dismantled what was a gem of a company into basically a dumpster fire. Look at the glassdoor reviews of some of their other holdings. Same story. We used to be a high trust organization. That is completely gone. No psychological safety. In fact, with the latest round of layoffs (second in as many quarters), they basically got rid of anyone who happened to push back against Bow River initiatives. All of this while replacing them with employees hand-picked by Bow River. Next quarter is always going to be better, they say. But, it's hard to keep up any sort of momentum when a good chunk of the company (and pillars of whatever culture we have left) are let go each quarter.

Viewing 1 - 3 of 47 Reviews

Glassdoor has 47 ProductPlan reviews submitted anonymously by ProductPlan employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if ProductPlan is right for you.