Thought Industries reviews

3-4 rounds of layoffs in the last 6 months. People taking on more and more work. Management not explaining decisions. Lots of fear and unhappiness. Shrinking pipeline. Losing sales to lower cost competitors. Company-wide paid vacation. 4 day trip to Scottsdale. We did literally no work. Plenty of expensive activities and drinks though. The sales and pipeline were already dropping by this point in the year. Laid people off the next month. Hiring more and more managers! They continued to add layers of management as they let go more and more of the people doing the actual work. Sales Structure Changes. The company changed its sales organization and process several times in the span of a year. Changed from vertical focus to enterprise/commercial focus, and then back to verticals. Changed sales philosophies several times. Changed org management several times. Regional managers, now a new VP. Oops that VP left. Now different managers. Now a new VP. Reps getting bounced from team to team multiple times. No chance to learn territory/vertical/build relationships. Prospects were scared off because they had their 3rd rep in 6 months because of the changes. Leadership retreats. Even though there was a spending and travel freeze for the whole organization, the senior managers still went on "Leadership" retreats every couple months. It's jarring to see photos on LinkedIn of the president of the company drinking cocktails at a resort for a company-paid retreat weeks after another round of layoffs. Incredibly demoralizing for the employees left. Not the most intuitive software. The learning software space is filled with hundreds, maybe thousands of platforms that all function roughly the same. This platform was not the easiest to set up, with functionality spread around the interface, as features were added ad hoc. Customers were upset with the implementation process as their expectations for services were different from the implementation team. Led to early dissatisfaction and sometimes churn. Unsure market fit. Too many features and too pricy for the mid-market space. Didn't have the enterprise connections, features, or services to compete well in the enterprise space. Didn't know where they wanted to take the product.

Unfortunately much of their investment in sales. So much so that it hurts the other parts of the organization. Sales is well paid for industry average. The rest of their roles are significantly underpaid. The fact that they are fully remote does not mean they have to pay low salaries for tech. They intentionally target areas of lower cost of living because it's all they are willing to spend. The fact that it is sales driven also means the roadmap is dictated by sales and renewals. There is no concept of product driven growth. They believe if you sell it, we will build through the gaps. This often leaves their Professional Services and Engineering teams left to scramble to try and make it happen or be thrown under the bus that is sales with no ramifications. The lack of diversity is concerning too. While they do have women in Director level and above roles there are only a couple to the dozen or so male counterparts. Most of those women are white. There are no men of color in Director or above positions. This lack of diversity tends to trickle down to management and individual contributor roles. Executive level referrals, down to the internship level, are largely the cause of this.