Disappointing, unprofessional, restrictive, dishonest and misrepresentative. A joke! - Anonymous employee StrongMind Employee Review

Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback. StrongMind is at an interesting point in its development – we did originate as the technical arm of Primavera Online and continue to support their efforts. In that sense, we are an enterprise software company with a large and established customer. However, several years ago we pivoted the organization and began generalizing our software into a platform capable of supporting outside schools and learning organizations. We face many of the same challenges as every other EdTech Startup – finding market fit, driving growth, keeping up with emergent trends, etc. It’s a challenging dichotomy and we are working to find the balance between the two worlds with varying degrees of success. We are proudly a flat organization, with everyone only a few “jumps” from the CEO on the org chart. This is by design – multiple layers of management slow decision making and take away autonomy and agency from the product teams. We want the people who do things to be empowered to make decisions about how we achieve our objectives. This does reduce the amount of traditional upward mobility as there simply aren’t many steps in our corporate ladder. Instead we advocate for more in place growth, where team members take on increasing responsibility within the context of their current domains. The benefit of this is twofold – first, it enables team membership to stay consistent and allows teams to gel with one another. Highly performant teams make a company go and we work to give teams the runway they need to find and optimize their performance as a unit. Second, it allows individuals to become experts in their product and form a deeper understanding of the users they serve. The risk of this approach is teams become insular. We combat this in a number of ways, such as: encouraging safaris (one employee working for several sprints on another team), supporting horizontal mobility across teams, and encouraging company-wide attendance at demos. We are not the right fit for individuals seeking to climb a traditional corporate ladder and we probably never will be. Our environment is casual, but results based. We support a flexible schedule, allowing employees to shift their schedule provided they deliver on expectations. For some, this looks like a traditional 8-5 schedule. For others, its more hours with breaks interspersed. Many employees choose to use the on-site gym during the day and stay later into the evening. Others schedule remote work days. Still more choose to work extended hours 4 days a week so they can leave early on Fridays. In terms of success, we are on-track to meet our growth and expansion goals for the year. If you did not attend the Q1 All Hands, I encourage you to watch the video for a summary of current progress towards our 2018 targets. We’re asking a lot from our teams – both in terms of delivery and flexibility – and we are investing to support them. Among other things, we grew staff by 40% last year, upped our resource spend, and support continued learning through resources like Pluralsight. Thank you again for taking the time to provide feedback. If you haven’t already, I also encourage you to submit specific concerns internally or to schedule a 1:1 with your VP to voice them in person or reach out to another member of leadership or our Human Resources staff.