-DECISION-MAKING: General lack of common sense in the decision-making process and a lot of obvious things are missed. Leadership spends an embarrassing amount of time deliberating no brainers and remaining indecisive on those. When it comes to the decisions that need to be carefully thought out, leadership makes a quick rash decision and almost always swings in the wrong direction on these, causing everyone on the front line to work like crazy to clean up the mess they've made and try to recover. There are also a lot of decisions that are communicated without any details on how to execute or even any thought behind whether it's something that can be executed.
-PRODUCT: Shaky at best. This is not a big data company and the product is not equipped to handle big data. General process is to over-service clients to make up for severe product limitations and gaps. New products and features are seemingly rolled out with little to any thought behind them in terms of integration with the rest of the platform or QA. Leadership doesn't seem to notice that these glaring issues exist until we've invested countless hours and resources in developing some half-baked idea, crippling the development of the rest of the product due to lack of resources. That leadership doesn't recognize these are half-baked ideas at the time of conception is another issue...
-LEADERSHIP: They lack the skills, consistency, and conviction in their decisions to be effective and respected. They inspire no confidence in their abilities with the constant changes in direction that occur what feels like every 20 minutes. There are also multiple people managers who are clearly not fit to to be people managers and they are driving good people away. My leader was inconsistent, lacked basic leadership and people management skills and qualifications, and had no business running a team - effectively running the team into ruin.
-PROFESSIONAL SERVICES: Stay away. The work is repetitive and unsatisfying and the technical skills you learn in pro services do not translate anywhere outside of Medallia. Career path is a joke. Leadership issues and politics run rampant.
-ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS: Company largely doesn't address the root cause when issues come up. The approach to issues is to patch them up and go and enter a state of constant inefficient maintenance. But this only applies when the company isn't busy burying its head in the sand.
-FIRE-FIGHTING: Get used to it. You won't be working towards anything big and impactful because every day will be filled with putting out fires. Everything...is...always...on...fire...it's exhausting.
-CULTURE: Despite what the company touts, this is not a company that's open to hearing the opinions of its employees. If you make the mistake of offering any sort of constructive criticism, be prepared because it's not welcome here. This is a company that pretends to be something it's not. It's not until you're on the inside that you realize just how bad it is.
-COMPENSATION: Expect to be low-balled. Many claims that comp is performance based, but the company seems to level everyone's comp.
-CAREER PATH: This should have been figured out by the time Medallia had 100 or before they hit 200 employees. Medallia has hit 1000 employees and this is still an open item. If the company is trying to send the message that HR and leadership don't care about career path and that employees shouldn't expect clearly articulated career path options, then message received. (They'll say that they care about it to save face but they don't actually execute.)
-PROMOTIONS AND ROLES: Highly political. Unless you're willing to snuggle up to leadership, know that good, hard work will get you nowhere. General misalignment in what you're hired to do and what you end up doing. Expect to do the job 1-2 levels above your role for 1-2 years before you get promoted to the role you've already been doing (don't bother to think about the lost wages for you in the process). Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free, right?
-GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT: Lots of talk about growth mindset, but it's all talk. If you're in Professional Services, once you learn the product (which takes 6-9 months at best), expect very little growth from then on. The work becomes highly repetitive and unsatisfying from then on. And when you're promoted, your role doesn't really change. You still do the same work as your prior role - you just do more of it. It's not uncommon to find managers doing analyst level work.
-PEOPLE AND CULTURE (HR TEAM): The HR reps don't know what they're doing and have no idea how to solve tough problems. This may be due to there being very few people on that team with formal HR experience and qualifications, making them largely ineffective. The team prefers to pretend everything is fine rather than to address what's going on, even when serious violations and fire-able offenses are reported to them. Seriously, do your job or continue to watch the company crumble.
-RECRUITING: They have a tendency to make false promises during the recruiting process. They'll bring you in for a Sr. Analyst or a Sr. Manager role and then tell you you'll be coming in one level lower as an Analyst or Manager instead, "but don't worry because you'll be fast-tracked to promotion to the role you interviewed for within 6 months." This is all lies. Recruiting has made these false promises to many people throughout the organization, and the bait and switch needs to stop.
-DOOMED TO REPEAT HISTORY: The company doesn't seem to learn from past mistakes and constantly repeats history. How many times has the ill-fated Customer Success team been created and re-created? (Pro tip: never join a newly created team. The running joke is that it will be dissolved within 6 months.)
-WORK-LIFE BALANCE: Severely lacking
-SCALE: Teams need to be able to scale what they're doing. There are clear issues with some leaders hoarding all the work within their teams, causing those teams to become unduly stressed with their workload. This is all because the leader wants to do what's good for himself/herself to stay relevant, despite this being something that's clearly bad for the company and not sustainable for the team members expected to deliver all the work.
