No Progression and Management and VPs Can't See Flaws - Anonymous employee Gainsight Employee Review

First of all, thank you for writing this. While I've done a poor job driving success for you, I can tell you care and want Gainsight to be better. Second, you are 100% right. While your experience may not be the same as everyone else's (and I'm not saying that critically - just focusing on yours), your experience is your own and that means we have failed you. Third, on that note, I saw your post on Friday and didn't stop thinking about it all weekend. To be honest, any time a teammate, a teammate's family member, a customer or an investor has a bad experience with Gainsight, it's like a dagger to my heart - a sign of my personal failure. While you listed that you approve of my personal performance, I do not approve of my performance in your case, in that I have failed to deliver for you. I own that. But thanks to your concern and constructive input, I don't have to wallow in that failure forever - I can get started on fixing it. A few broad points in response to your post: 1. I do want to bring data to bear where possible to assess broader themes. As you may know, our CCO runs a monthly Teammate Success NPS survey in the post-sales team (which we'll expand eventually to the entire company). In addition, you are probably aware that I do regular "roundtables" with 4-6 teammates at a time (including 6 a week ago in St. Louis with ~40 people total). Some points I hear are consistent with your observations and some are unique. 2. That being said, no matter what the data shows broadly, your experience is your own and data doesn't take away from that - or from the work we have to do. 3. A massive "root cause" of these issues (in my opinion) is that we have an open req for a VP Teammate Success and it's taken a while to hire the right person (100% on me but I'm actively working on it). 4. On the flip side, another deep point underlying your comments is the fact that we want to embrace a truly geographically distributed culture at Gainsight. You rightly point out some areas where we fail at living up to that, so thank you for shining a light on areas where I need to improve. Glassdoor has a character limit so I'll include brief responses on each point: * Unlimited PTO usage: I haven't seen data as to whether very few take it (we don't track but should), but I know we need to do more to encourage. I try to share my vacations in transparency. I think we can do more here vis-a-vis recognizing people for taking PTO. * 401K match: I haven't seen data that most of our employees are young across all offices but regardless, we increased healthcare and dropped matching to be competitive with other cos of our stage. In addition, I do believe startups often end up being "age biased" and I want to be a welcoming place for those with families and those of all ages. I recognize this doesn't help you though, and I'm sorry for that. * Market pay: We did a study a year ago and one of the top priorities of the new VP will be to refresh data and adjust as data indicates. Thanks for highlighting this. * Promotion time: I checked on the VP you mentioned; first request from exec to promote VP was 3 months before promotion. Our promotion process is deliberately long to ensure parity but I recognize how that can be frustrating and I'm sorry for that. * Same 5 people solve issues / execs in one office: We need to get more diverse in our decision making. We are hiring a VP Services and plan to have that person spend a huge chunk of time in our St. Louis office. I am actively looking at VP Teammate Success candidates in St. Louis. As you may know, our CMO moved to NYC which will help make us less California-centric as an exec team. We need to do more here - great point. * Constant reorgs: I do think growing companies reorganize regularly to align to new needs so I don't shy away from that. I also think a reorg doesn't mean the old org was wrong - usually every org structure is good for some things and bad for others. But we need better institutional memory to make sure careers progress through org changes - big part of new VP TS' job. * Time zones: I hear you on this one and I also think it's a core part of our model. Many startups with Bay Area funding assume the only place to hire is in Silicon Valley. We have embraced a distributed model which means we can give opportunity to folks everywhere but it comes at a communication / time zone cost. I think we can get more efficient to reduce the burden though so I look forward to brainstorming on this. BTW I think coordination with Indian time zones affects some roles in GS a lot but not all. Can't thank you enough for writing this. Only by pushing - even in critical ways - will Gainsight become the company we all want it to be.