4y
Thanks for the feedback. Here is my reflection
On the "Pros":
I am glad that the reviewer liked our flexible PTO policy. We will continue to offer flexibility to our employees, like unlimited PTO with no questions asked, working from home etc.
On the "Cons":
1. I think the reviewer got a point about the PLG strategy: Even though at the early days we mainly relied on our product to grow, in the last a couple of years we switched to mostly sales driven. How can we go back to PLG and get both to work seamlessly? It is something we are still experimenting.
2. Speaking of "disingenuous", I'd say this is something we also need to improve, by giving an employee timely, honest feedback. For example, if the head of customer success wasn't able to offer proper support to an important customer, with the reason being "afraid of losing the customer", we should have communicated to her that this is unacceptable as soon as it was found out.
3. this one I am not sure - We constantly expand our market. For a new vertical we tap into, we do need to better understand their workflow and learn how to provide our best support, which is why we hired somebody to lead our customer success team to help with that. But if I were that person, I'd not just blame the sales or product for failing to do my job in customer success. At least our high NPS and low churn rate would disagree with the "product not market ready" statement.
4. I admit it - as the founder I never manged people before, that's why I am here, to hear feedback, and to learn how I can do better!
On the "Advice to Management":
I disagree with the "bad apples" part. I don't see any "bad apples" in our current team or former team members. We do have people left us for better compensations and other jobs they are more passionate about, also we have terminated a few jobs for various reasons. But they are all good people, even for this reviewer, I understand her frustration after her job was terminated here and the reason why she posted a negative review (which I think she got some fair points). I wish her all the best.
Pei Zhan
Founder, CEO of ArcSite
