The organization as a whole is not managed well.
Policies and procedures are poorly considered and ineffective.
It seems like there's a disconnect between the experiences of people actually doing the work and interacting with clients - and those establishing the internal policies and processes.
Performance expectations are high - but there's little in the way of support, organizational structure or resources to help deliver the desired results.
It's impossible to convey true urgency around the very serious deficiencies, gaps, or inadequate features of the product suite - but there's a heavy sense of artificial urgency around every build release or bug fix.
There is a tremendous amount of tech-debt and it's only getting worse. The current codebase has been continually extended and amended for about 25-years - it looks appropriately ancient, is mostly undocumented, but there are clients still actively using these undocumented functionalities - meaning any "fix" likely breaks something for an existing client.
The chief product officer wants to build a ton of new stuff quickly and is happy to cut corners to do so - which means little in the way of proper planning or QA - while simultaneously trying to integrate these new features with existing products and avoid disruptions to the existing codebase.
The emphasis is on releasing MVPs as quickly as possible - typically *BEFORE* they're actually viable for clients - with the thinking being that they'll be fleshed out over time...
Unfortunately - there's no time or will to go back and work on something that has already been released - so these half finished products/features just die a slow death.
As a whole, the organization is almost entirely reactive - meaning there's little in the way of proper long term planning or prioritization - and almost everything is driven by trying to put out fires.
You can plan a great new feature and it will sit in the backlog for months or years - until a client threatens to leave over it's absence - at which point it will jump the queue and CMiC will rush out a shoddy, half-baked implementation - which will cause a huge number of bugs and be basically unusable.
Any related features, essential for the newly released feature to be useful and effective; will be dropped and forgotten about as soon as the half-baked "MVP" is out the door.
If you have any notions about what a "product manager" does, the meaning of "agile" or any type of best practices, you're in for a disappointing surprise.
