Productboard Reviews

I say this with all sincerity - unless you’re on the verge of homelessness, do not join this company. You will likely be out of a job within 6-months as it feels like it’s in a death spiral. Maybe you’ve even experienced this before - being asked to do worthless things that are ineffective and reek of desperation, having to listen to the CEO’s unhinged rambling and his execs spin spin spin (or in some cases just flat out lie), watch critical product improvements get delayed months, sometimes years. In the last year, there have been three “official” layoffs, but an uncountable number of unofficial ones, where people are just there one day and gone the next. A new president came in and hired up a team of enterprise dudes (that’s right - all men) who will quickly discover the product is unsellable to large companies. And unusable to current customers, who are churning faster than anyone can keep track (CEO will say the problem is just on the commercial side - it’s not). Leads from marketing are drying up, as the new CMO is a puppet for the president, an unprofessional gossiper, but most concerning - does not understand demand generation. All of these things (despite how Hubert might spin it) point in one obvious direction - make the company appear profitable and product-focused in the hopes of getting sold quickly.

When I first started here, one of the company values was "transparency" and there was a slack channel where employees could ask anonymous questions to leadership. I thought that was great. Then, they killed this feature, because they thought transparency was when vulnerable employees asked hard questions in front of the whole company to powerful executives. If you're thinking "that sounds really dumb" it's because it is. It's really dumb. Welcome to the leadership team at Productboard. When I joined, the company was pretty great, tons of super smart, driven people. We handled COVID very well, and the company prospered despite all the massive disruptions happening around the world. We had a seamless transition to working remotely and had our best, most profitable years when we were working from home. During this time, our already distributed company hired tons and tons of remote people around the world, in all kinds of places where we didn't have hubs. Then Hubert decided it was time to throw all of our success out the window. My boss lived a thousand miles away from me. Their boss lived in another country. Everyone on my team lived in a different country. My days started earlier and earlier, until I regularly had 6:30 AM meetings. My family begged me to start looking for another job, it was killing my work/life balance. But it got worse. Hubert wanted everyone back in the office. Why? Because. What office - people live all over the world? Whatever, figure it out. Now I had to commute into SF to have those 6:30 AM Zoom meetings. There were never enough areas in the office to have Zoom calls even though there was almost nobody in the office. Why? Because everyone in the office was in the same situation, with tons of 7 AM meetings with their team. Hubert put his foot down and said you absolutely positively no joke had to be in the office on this day of the week. Like a dumb dumb I took this seriously and showed up and there were only 5 other employees there. The whole office treated it like a joke, because it was a joke. What could leadership possibly do to hurt company morale further? Oh, I know. He could have surprise layoffs, handle them horribly, and then tell everyone left at the company that he was going to use a ton of money to have an off-site. It was such bad taste, and then he did another round of layoffs after that. Hubert is unprofessional and makes very bad decisions that hurt the morale, the product, and the company culture. He has an enormous ego and doesn't want to hear no. He truly does not understand the customer at all, and does not listen to feedback from those who do. He surrounds himself with yes men and fires everyone else. I've never felt comfortable recommending that someone come work at Productboard. I instantly got another job somewhere else where I made a ton more money and keep a reasonable work life balance again. I do not miss Productboard at all. Also, this doesn't get mentioned enough, but this is the whitest, broiest tech company I've ever worked at. I had some of the worst encounters of my professional life here, especially with men in Prague who are like 20 years behind the times when it comes to equality in the work place. They'd say things that are covered word for word in the required sexual harassment trainings. Women in this company routinely had to deal with microaggressions, and people of color - what am I saying? There are no people of color at this company. It's so embarrassing.