Creative and engaging workplace, continuously improving
Pros
I'll admit that I had some serious reservations about joining Whisker. I read the reviews here, and lots of them trend negative. While some facets of these reviews are based in truth, it is historical truth. Whisker seems to have evolved beyond these things, and my experience has been nothing short of excellent so far. I relocated to join, so it was a full commitment and change of lifestyle. I have no regrets. Some pros: - My direct manager is creative, experienced, and very intellectually and emotionally intelligent. He gives me full freedom to do the work without micromanagement. - I'm also an experienced and highly self-reflective manager, and I empower my team to make their own decisions about how to get their jobs done. People who want autonomy and ownership over their work can find that here. - There is a high degree of psychological safety. You're safe to experiment and you're not punished for mistakes. - I'm encouraged by HR to focus on career pathing, and I spend a good amount of time doing that for my team. I want them to continue moving forward in their careers, even if it means that I might lose them someday (hopefully to other positions within the company). - Whisker is a creative machine. From our marketing team working on some of the most engaging product messaging to the engineering teams working on fantastically creative technical solutions, we truly have some amazing people on staff. - We now have a team of experienced people who know the right things to do - proper processes, business cases, roadmaps, data-driven analyses, etc. Granted, some of these are still being formally codified, but the path to their full implementation is clear. - Whisker is a learning organization. Even in the short time I've been here, I've seen paths which were not the right ones get corrected with a reasonable amount of openness. The Whisker of today is not the Whisker of yesterday. - It's nice to have cats and dogs in the office.
Cons
Of course, no place is perfect. - Over the past several years, Whisker has moved from a young company to one which is more well-established, and corporate maturity has somewhat lagged growth. As mentioned above, we're still formalizing some processes. Older habits can be hard to break, but I have full confidence that we'll get there. I'm working shoulder to shoulder with everyone to do exactly that. - I don't always have good visibility into things at the C-level. Granted, I'm in a mid-level role here, and I'm adjusting to that. Having an MBA and experience working at high-level corporate strategy for smaller companies, I have something to add there. Currently, I'm pouring myself into focusing on the smaller, more tactical areas I can improve, though. - Sometimes the office cats try to eat your lunch. They know that they are secretly in charge.
