Sales-Driven Leadership With No Strategy — Product Roles Are Smoke and Mirrors
Pros
Talented and friendly peers at the non-executive level who genuinely care about solving customer problems, despite the organizational challenges.
Cons
If you’re a real product manager who wants to influence a roadmap or work with actual engineering teams, run. At SICK US, “product management” is a marketing/Sales Enablement hybrid with a fancy title. Decisions, roadmaps, and anything resembling long-term product strategy all come from Germany — the US team is left to sell whatever shows up in the catalog. The result: leaders here call themselves innovators but have zero ownership over actual products. Most of the leadership pipeline is ex-salespeople who climbed up by talking, not building. They are great at buzzwords, but ask them to explain market dynamics or why a solution is failing… and you’ll get a motivational speech instead of a plan. People with technical expertise or customer knowledge aren’t promoted — they’re used until they burn out. The company is trying to sell complex software and robotics systems with a mindset stuck in simple sensors. Execs responsible for entire business units don’t understand the industries they’re “leading,” yet they make massive decisions without ever asking the teams doing the work. Unrealistic revenue targets get handed down from nowhere, and when goals are missed, leadership shrugs and blames the frontline. Support? Minimal. Influence? None. Ownership? Zero. But expectations? Through the roof. The culture rewards internal politics over competence. Strategy is “sell what Germany gives you, and pretend it aligns to customer needs.” Meanwhile, anyone asking for customer-driven product decisions gets labeled “not a team player.” Unless you’re content being a glorified GTM coordinator who gets judged on decisions you never had the authority to make, I’d look elsewhere. There are companies that actually empower product teams — SICK US just isn’t one of them.