Poor management and challenged strategy realisation
Pros
1. Great team of developers and engineers - almost everyone in charge of shipping is great guys. 2. Salary is OK. Some team members who was relocated from Russia had nice bonuses. 3. Initial goal was really inspiring. But company has never lived up to it.
Cons
1. Lack of consistency. Company's major product is an all-in-one platform for educational courses creation and implementation. Any other company product should've never been considered a separate one, it should have been positioned as a platform module alongside with other products. Platform itself didn't have any concrete shape until the end of 2023, neither had it a separate product manager. 2. Poor planning: company failed to launch platform-as-a-service with intended capabilities because different teams were working on their products without having the leading plan consisting of platform-wide capabilities. Which could be broken down into smaller product-specific features. 3. Lack of focus: absence of the general plan led to the situation where each product was developing according to the product roadmap created by product team and without considering other products' roadmaps. In this case, building the platform will take multiples of intended time. Other significant downside is that the composition rule is broken: separate products being developed independently couldn't grow into the single cohesive platform. Platform should've been the main product, it should've defined requirements and restrictions for all other products. 4. Lack of development resources: the company launched a new product every 6-7 months without investing in growing teams. This led to the fact that product managers were busy with several products at once, and development teams were getting smaller and smaller with each new product. As an outcome, each product's timeline grew two times at least once for a previous two years. 5. Lack of processes: product-related processes on the discovery side were not introduced at all - each product team was inventing their own. Delivery part was covered much better. 6. Focus on delivery: most of the product managers' efforts were put into grinding user stories and working on UI mockups with designers. Given that development and engineering workforce was not enough, it actually meant that Product managers didn't have time nor energy to work with market insights. 7. Focus on sales: while product team tried to deliver as much as possible, other part of the company tried to sell whatever was delivered. As products were not aligned even a bit and couldn't have been bundled, company struggled competing with single-purpose products which already were on the market. Cherry on the top is that management blaming all product problems - in sales, in UX, in failing to keep up with the development plan - on product managers.
