Product and Company Culture
Poor approach when it comes to customer management. Extremely reactive; Model N's mantra is we will wait for customer complaints, and if they complain too much Model N will award them a BS award at their annual 'Rainmaker' to pacify. Customers are not first, but neither are employees, baffles me to this day what exactly are they doing at Mode N.
Go to Market strategy: the way Model N brings products to market is deceitful, it’s a half-baked product at best and the approach again is we will make the customer pay for features that should be standard as custom enhancements. Sales and Solutions team does an extremely good job of misleading customers. “Enterprise grade” products that cannot handle enterprise level data! Most projects get stuck at this stage of implementation.
Model N, has no real competition in the market, buying out their main competitor should allow them to increase margin and revenue, yet they have failed to do so.
They continue to have layoffs which never make the news because the layoffs conveniently are below the threshold that the SEC requires to be made public. Layoffs have been going on for quite some time, another telltale sign of what is happening behind the scenes.
Leadership (Lack of)
As far as management, most managers are glorified baby sitters at best, every two weeks you have 1:1 call which goes nowhere, in my 5+ years at Model N I never felt like this helped in fact it was an annoyance and took time away from doing more productive things during the day. They are not empowered to do much, they require permission to make any decision of any significance. The VP’s seem to be an old boys club and the new CEO seems like he’s part of the same crew.
Female Leadership: The current VP of Marketing and other two women were back to back VP’s of HR one was fired and the other quit, so HR has no leadership at the helm although even if anyone was in that role it would a waste.
Career
Career advancement is a great joke, annual pay raises are about 1% if you are lucky, 401k match is sub-par, bonuses are ok and RSU are a nice carrot if the stock price ever went above $20 and stayed at that price. All the while the internal propaganda is that Model N is on par with the rest of the Silicon Valley companies.
There is no career path, and your annual reviews are a complete waste of time. Managers will use your annual review to tell you well you didn’t meet all your goals and we don’t have any advancements for this year again!
Wait, it gets better! Training, well there isn’t any training. Any internal demos conducted by product management is recorded via WebEx. This recorded WebEx is now part of training and now you have been trained on a product that is no bearing on your day to day activities or your role.
Complete lack and care of individual growth. How can we cut corners is Model N’s mantra!
An absolute disappointment of my career, even while I was at Model N I generally steered my friends and colleagues away from this company. The future doesn't bode well but am hopeful for the hard working people.