• Middle management is largely incompetent and adds little value.
• Product leadership fosters a toxic culture, bias and favoritism.
• Clear inequities exist across the company; the “gap” is real and ignored.
• Engineering leadership lacks technical expertise and hides behind process theater with no real impact.
• Product teams are disengaged; strong talent exists but is wasted due to zero coaching or career development.
• Customer success and commercial teams are frustrated and escalate everything, dragging product into constant firefighting.
• AI is treated as a “magic fix” for a crumbling legacy platform that could fail at any moment; genuine innovation is stalled.
• Leadership refuses to retire outdated products because ARR is the only priority.
• Product is unfairly held accountable for financial results instead of being enabled to innovate.
• The C-suite is powerless; all decisions are made unilaterally by the CEO.
• The company is sales-driven to an extreme, at the expense of everything else.
• Long-tenured employees (5+ years) often coast, while 2% of the workforce carries the company and burns out.
• Burnout is widespread across all functions, with little to no support from leadership.
• Morale is extremely low; management ignores issues and gaslights employees.
• Workload and pace are unsustainable, and results consistently fail to match the effort.
