There are way too many cons to list here. The best summary I can provide is that I found leadership (co-founders - CEO & COO - especially) to be, at best, dishonest, opaque, dismissive, and unsupportive of the Product team in particular.
A culture of intimidation from the COO is rampant and unchecked and many teams across the org are suffering poor work-life balance due both co-founders sharing a strong belief that "just get an engineer to build it" will somehow create a world-class product.
All of these cons are based on a year of being derided and blamed as a product manager for a litany of operational problems while simultaneously being handcuffed by what the co-founders felt was important from day-to-day whims and chasing competitors.
- Compensation (base and equity) isn’t competitive
- Transparency is not a value that's seemingly lived by the leadership team. Decisions are regularly made in the usual closed-door manner and shared with teams at the last possible second. This includes massive re-orgs, engineering re-allocations, and product priorities to name just a few
- The CEO is dishonest and lacks critical people management skills
- The COO/CTO regularly undermines the product department and has created a culture of confusion around PMs leading to disorganized product development processes and mistrust among non-Product teams
- The COO will also regularly parachute into complex projects with impossible deadlines and mandates, which adds to confusion and prolongs any reasonable solution on any reasonable timeline
- Both co-founders seem to drive product priority based on what competitors are doing and other feelings and opinions. Never data. When product managers try to do any semblance of discovery, we were told that we're "too slow", "paralyzed by analysis" and "too indecisive" despite having to also untangle incredibly complex operational processes at the same time
- The CEO claims he values candid feedback, but after sharing a document with him with a collection of feedback from myself and my peers, a previously-approved role change was rescinded. This has created a culture where PMs in particular no longer feel safe sharing feedback that isn't anonymized
- Both co-founders regularly preach how important "results" are and it seems to be a metric by which people, especially product managers, are evaluated; however, this is never defined further and so the ambiguous, subjective nature seems to allow them to use it as an excuse for any number of decisions they make
- Some teams at Remote have shared that they prefer external hires for Director+ roles given the stress involved with working more closely with the co-founders and fear of job security. This is strongly felt among the Product team
There’s so many cons to working at Remote, specifically in the Product department. I'm optimistic the new CPO will be able to affect change for the better here.
I would give Remote 0 stars if I could based on my personal experiences there but I gave it two stars because the mission is noble and the employees are mostly all kind people who want to improve things.
