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Thank you so much for taking the time to leave us your feedback. Since one of our core values is to get better, we always take feedback seriously and will use these points within our retrospectives to self-reflect and identify ways we can improve where needed.
We’re proud of the way that we’ve been able to incorporate our remote employees so that they are productive and feel like part of the UserTesting family, and we’ve made a ton of great strides with our benefits in the past few years so that now we offer some of the most competitive benefits around, so it’s nice to hear that you valued these things as part of your experience at UserTesting.
We’re very concerned that you felt like you had to work within a confined culture spectrum. We value any and all different opinions and perspectives; in fact we think that it makes our company more effective. Having said that, we do have a set of core values (get better, customers first, keep it simple, own results, be kind) that are essential to the company that we expect that all employees demonstrate. Additionally, our culture really values collaboration, openness, and teamwork and despite our best efforts in interviewing and hiring, we have found that it can be frustrating to individuals who prefers alternative work styles that aren’t conducive to what we value. We celebrate when individuals see the value and are open to improving skills in this area through mentoring and support. Likewise we are disappointed when individual preferences preclude them from improvement.
Thank you so much for your opinions on OKRs. OKRs are still fairly new to us, so we admit that there is a learning curve and and we need to get better at using them. Notwithstanding the growing pains, we feel like they’re the best way to measure our goals and our success against those goals. Over the past couple of years, we have learned so much in this area and we have striven and continue to strive to continuously improve our OKR process.
It was unfortunate that you did not feel that you did not get value from the one-on-ones with your manager and that you felt that they did not understand what you did day to day. Our managers care a lot about the success of their direct reports and work hard to ensure that support is meaningful. We have found that the best way for individuals day to day work to be seen and appreciated by team leads, peers, and managers is to make sure that the work that is being done is related to the work the team is doing, exists in our project management tracking tools, is reviewed in pull requests by peers, and discussed in our daily standups.
We’re sorry to hear that you felt that your opinions weren’t valued because of a lack of tenure. In our industry and at our company, there are so many changes that we have to value the opinions of all of our employees, whether they’ve been here for five years or five weeks. Our Engineering Team also prides itself on its openness and collaboration. All ideas are vetted out in the open with the whole team and have to get the proper buy in before they are implemented. As a result, we are always experimenting and making decisions based on empirical data and collective experience because we know that the best ideas, no matter the tenure of the source, will win.
