Pros
Had you asked me a year ago if I would recommend Apto the answer would have probably been a resounding "yes". Today you couldn't pay me an above market salary to work there. I would say that Apto is about to repeat history again after churning through multiple engineering/sales/support departments. This will probably be the fourth iteration. Oh. As for pros I guess you get free lunch on Weds.
Cons
As some of the recent reviews go one can surmise that there were multiple pockets of opinions in the company. Most people optimized for what individually made them successful versus where the company had to actually put investment in. I think most departments didn't truly understand the limitations of the original product that was built (except maybe CS to a degree). This is where the customer pains came in. Too many unique snowflakes in customers creates the inability to iterate on a product because one "simple" change will affect all workflows in the product for other customers. You can fork the product for that customer but then when they want to get updated you create a massive headache for other departments to work around customizations for that customer. There was quite a bit of blame that went around for this which is pretty funny because none of the original people who built any of it were at the company at this point anyway. What Apto needs to do is grow up and take ownership of the problem. Stop pitting departments against each other and work together on _one true vision_ for the product. Expectations of what the product does vs what it should do shifted quite a bit as well. Especially for specific segments of the market. A feature would get built for one segment of customers, but it wouldn't meet all the needs of other segments of customers after release. This is normal in product development as you continue to build out a robust platform for the different segments. You also learn by continuing to ship and fix as customers discover new patterns for using the feature. What ends up happening internally, however, is that the feature is seen as a complete failure because segment "X" of customers aren't supported for this feature. This completely demotivates and demoralizes teams. It also created a crippling effect on the team to deliver new features as the team never knew what expectations to set when building the next thing. It really is a ripe market and I am sure one of Apto's many competitors will actually dominate here. Apto itself though? Doubtful.
