Pros
*Peers – smart, hard-working, sociable. In-person office culture that can be quite fun. *High variance – teams and managers, though generally cut from the same cloth, can be very different. Potential to find a great role with desirable responsibilities (actual, not just those stated on the job description) and proper resourcing. *Comp – competitive with market, long-term value of options is still tbd.
Cons
If you see the words "product" or "strategic" in a job title, it's likely anything but that. The vast majority of people in these roles are gloried project managers with a broad mandate but seldom the engineering resources or political capital to make actual change. The result? Work that is largely manual, monotonous, and unchallenging once you pick up the lingo and internal tooling. These roles have low retention for a reason: mismatch between the persona these roles hire for — high IQ/EQ + blue-chip backgrounds (McKinsey, Ivies, former founders, etc.) + technical — and what the role actually requires, which is a project manager with high work ethic, can write some SQL, and looks impressive to customers, but doesn't want to do anything intellectually challenging. It's potentially a match for ex-consultants but others should think twice about the role. To be fair, I think leadership recognizes the resourcing challenges, but change takes time. I would only recommend Scale SPM/POM if you were to join in ~mid 2023 once we build the right horizontal tooling + platform and learn to actually plan for deal growth and the resulting need for headcount. EPD is a decent place to be in general, and on the right team I could recommend it today (please reach out to former employees on your offered team to get their opinion – again, high variance). It's also ridiculously political for an org of this size. Much of the leadership has low EQ, will yell at junior employees, and in general fails to create a collaborative environment where everyone feels compelled (let alone safe) to share their opinions, especially if they're contrary to those in the CEO's "inner circle." A lot of churn at the C-suite, especially finance, that doesn't engender confidence either. TL;DR: this is an operations business that still feels like a consultancy. Tons of manual work, politics, and heroics that need to get pulled by project teams to drive outcomes. Despite all of the above, still bullish long term on the data labeling/collection business (hard to sell the SaaS products), just hard to recommend you join today.