Leadership has no accountability causing extreme burnout and mental health struggles for individual contributors - Anonymous employee Babbel Employee Review

The biggest con is that the environment has made very competent colleagues question their own skills and the value they bring, leading to decreasing confidence and overwhelming imposter syndrome. There is no thought leadership in how to actually build products, as well as an active refusal for anyone to take on this responsibility. This leads most of the creative and user centric functions to advocate for themselves daily for a seat at the table in any product decisions. When these concerns are raised, we are met with leaders questioning our reality and taking offense to ICs highlighting the fact that we need and expect more from them. Marketing runs the show. If you are passionate about delivering good products that solve real problems, this is not the place for you. The product organization lacks any strong hold in strategic decision making, leaving the whole department to work reactively to other stronger decision makers. This lack of strategic vision leads to long, unfocused discovery processes ending in the smallest most technically feasible release, which brings minimal at best value to users. These processes can take up to a year, and once features are released they are typically left untouched in the product for many months more. Innovation dies here. Overall, there is a lack of accountable decision making in leadership, putting most if not all of the stress on individual contributors to piece together stories of how things should work, advocate for what what users need, guess what the next random strategic decision will be, and try to make a case for why any good idea is worth anyone's time. This is on top of all of the personal advocating for any career growth or respectable salary.