Development teams work on very short sprint cycles, which is pretty uncommon in mature product organizations. This often forced product to push work into development before it was properly defined or validated. Despite being in a scale up phase, the company still operated like an early stage startup, which showed up in the tooling used to manage work (Trello). This mismatch between company stage and operating model created constant executional friction.
Collaboration between strategy and product was nonexistent at its worst and tense at its best. PMs had virtually no say in strategy decisions and were instead handed decisions by the strategy team that lacked grounding in what was feasible or made sense from a technical or scalability perspective. Solutions were almost always hastily patchworked together on artificial timelines, which resulted in a platform that was hard to scale on top of and was sometimes not actually used as anticipated by the target user. This is very typical of a feature factory company, where decisions are handed down that make sense in theory but don’t make sense in practice. Add short sprint timelines and you’ve got a recipe for short sighted solutions and burned out teams.
One example of this was work being reused or referenced without a clear understanding of whether the original solution had actually delivered value. When we dug into whether a prior feature was the right solution to build on for a new project, it became clear that it had seen little real user adoption, which surprised even the original owner of the feature. Nothing says “feature factory” like unused software that clutters the interface and doesn’t meaningfully serve end users.
In my time on this team, I also noted that we needed to be far more prescriptive in requirements for engineers than is typically necessary in any mature product org. Engineers often seemed slow, irritable, and clearly burned out. I had on numerous occasions spotted a manager using their phone on camera during meetings. I've never experienced such blatant disrespect for people's time. Although this is just one experience and doesn't define the entirety of the organization, it's pretty telling how frustrating working here was.
Finally, the culture can be pretty toxic at times. People were constantly ripping on each other and throwing personal jabs masked as jokes.
The product organization also churns its talent at a high rate. Experienced PMs tend to leave after gaining a clear understanding of the role dynamics and operating model.