In my pros, I mentioned how employees are generally happy with the perks and the pay. But—in the very same survey—when asked about their overall outlook about the company and its mission, that’s where scores suffer.
Part of it could be the company’s vision (“To see every student graduate confident and prepared”), which is reminiscent of a beauty pageant contestant wishing for world peace. It is noble but not super compelling, especially at a time when college is more expensive than ever. Most people at Course Hero want to change the landscape of education by making it more accessible, not cost-prohibitive.
But I think the larger issue is that the company is trying to be something for everyone. To be valuable for every student and for every educator. So rather than focusing on building a platform and being the best at serving a particular subset of that audience or capitalizing on a specialized service (à la Chegg’s textbook rentals), Course Hero is trying to be the best at serving everyone in every subject—which is a really vague directive for engineering and product teams to be working under. This lack of clarity results in countless hours of meetings and brainstorming sessions that lack any real focus, objective, or follow-up.
Additionally, there is a disconnect between the internal Course Hero “bubble” and our real-world customers, which has resulted in seemingly half-baked executive decisions and a perpetual string of MVP launches that fail to address actual customer needs. What’s unfortunate is that these MVPs are rarely, if ever, improved upon or optimized based on user feedback, so they are quickly swept under the rug. Then priorities shift, managers change, and it’s back to square one.
As it stands, there seems to be more emphasis on crafting the image we want people to have of Course Hero versus making tangible improvements that would benefit students' lives and ultimately improve a user’s experience.
In the end, employees who joined Course Hero thinking they were going to work on something meaningful or exciting for students end up getting bored or disillusioned and ultimately leave.
The rest stick around because, well, it’s a great people company with great perks and a nice paycheck. Unfortunately, being a great people company without a great product has created a culture of complacency. And without more focused leadership making more difficult and smarter decisions based on actual customer data and feedback, Course Hero will continue launching half-baked, watered-down features based on groupthink that fail to satisfy customer needs.
TL;DR:
If you are applying or interviewing for Course Hero, you’ve picked a great people company. Leadership, though, is still relatively new, and they're trying to find Course Hero's product-market fit, so be prepared to evolve on a quarterly basis with the company’s needs. The company is at a critical juncture as they invest more in machine learning, and the next couple of years are going to be quite telling of the company's long-term outlook.
