Incompetent management undermines a promising product - Technical Account Manager Corral Data Employee Review

Whew, where to begin. The CEO lacks vision, he sees the product as an outsourcing data analyst tool that is an unsustainable business model. He wants to overwork the analysts to the point they quit instead of seeing the product for what it is, a BI platform that can replace stuff like Tableau due to ease of use and speed. I mean....your product can literally build dashboards and visualizations from AI, and instead you force increased case inflow, you force the data analysts to drop everything to...take the customer case, copy and paste their ask, input it into the AI tool, then...it builds it for them. Why do we not self-serve? Why aren't we teaching the customers to use the product? The sky is the limit for what the customer can do, but instead you purposely hold the balloons down to the earth and refuse to let them fly. It's a ridiculous strategy with a product that could be game changing. It's the equivalent of owning a goose that lays golden eggs, not seeing that it lays golden eggs, someone tells you it lays golden eggs you shout at them, then just go on about your day eating golden eggs for breakfast and wasting value. The product itself has numerous issues, namely on the backend they get spammed with database resource alerts and we're told to ignore them, despite the person that is telling us to ignore them (COO) fundamentally does not understand what the alerts mean and will regularly tell you it's just noise or spam. If your database is screaming at you about disk space...it's likely because there is resource constraint and the queries are spooling to disk so it has enough resource to process an expensive query. This is relevant information for a TAM to say...get ahead of customer outage issues that I experienced twice in one month of being there. They fundamentally do not understand what these alerts mean and lean way too heavily on the developers who SHOULD be working on R&D but instead are randomized into solving outages. How do you fix this? Something I literally suggested. Scale the servers out, stop relying on autoscaling, and configure the alerts to be per customer, and be way less sensitive so the information is valid, though the regular alerts they see already are very concerning. More importantly, if your CPU is struggling and sending alerts to the channel, that means you're about to crash the server due to poorly written vibe coded queries that are pulling in too much data. You can spot them in 5 seconds in the activity log, but you're told that's not relevant by people who have no comprehension of server stability. If you're getting queries running over 15 seconds constantly...that is an issue. There's no effort taken to investigate why that query is taking too long, and optimizing it. They don't want to use native applications for data connectors and instead spend far too many cycles migrating to open source. Why? I tried asking that and got punted to multiple members of the team without a clear answer, which tells me they have no comprehension of what data connectivity even is. Why are native tools good? Because it's baked into the overall tech stack, has a better connection, and will likely offer more connections than what you're trying to build. Think of it like Apple products, it just works. The COO...an OPERATING OFFICER...thinks a day in the life document makes no sense for someone who hasn't been a TAM. I offered to take over that document...radio silence, and offense was taken at me asking that...There is no clear vision or direction there and it's just vibes and "yeknow do the thing"....No...you run a successful business on process and logic not vibes. I have extensive escalations experience. They handle customer feedback by dragging the C team into calls instead of delegating out to someone who can field those responses. You can easily cut down process time by having someone dedicated instead of overworking everyone, you spread the work out. For a CEO that doesn't understand the importance of process, it's wild to me that they just CHOOSE to do things in the most inefficient way possible. From the words of multiple team members...the CEO HATES process, and instead runs on vibes. That's clear with how often and significant the pushback was on basic options. I asked about running a Fiddler trace to confirm a proxy issue wasn't the issue with a failed oauth token and got told I shouldn't ask questions because it takes time away from the team...all while the CTO is telling me it's great feedback and to continue asking questions. Kinda like no one is running the ship and no one is in line. The COO will lie to your face in the interview and tell you that this is an ask culture. There's 2 types of cultures in workspaces, ask or guess. Guess is when the environment is toxic to asking questions so you just guess or "run on vibes". The minute you ask questions about process you're scolded by management and shamed into just shutting up and focusing on revenue. You ask about how to setup account standups, you're ignored, you ask about TAM process and what day to day looks like for a successful workload, silence. You ask what the methodology is for assigning accounts when you're assigning your most challenging technical accounts to a CSM not a TAM, and you get met with hostility. The company has an aversion to process, an aversion to structure, and an aversion to kindness. Why do I bring up kindness? Well, the COO did in the interview. They tell you that "everyone here is just kind" which...that's a lie. Flat out lie, you will be shamed for asking questions, shamed for seeking to understand, randomized and micromanaged brutally to try to pick apart something you did wrong in a case when you didn't and are actively handling higher case loads than the people you decided to keep, and at the end of the day, it's not a cultural fit if you truly want kindness and an ask culture. You ask what the core values of the company are, they look at you like you just asked them to recite the Magna Carta word for word. The reason? The company has no core values and are the definition of a place that will plaster the core values on a wall and adhere to none of them. I could go on and on for days, but ultimately if you want to be successful here, know that it isn't an ask culture and you'll have to essentially grasp at straws in the dark, it's absolutely not an inclusive company as there is so much pushback to neurodivergent individuals who need information to be successful, and at the end of the day, to be successful here you need to ignore all the red flags, all the lies about kindness, and just work yourself to death. Your Operating Officer lacks any depth in terms of leadership, how to run a day to day, zero idea how to make the teams more efficient, you buy ridiculously unnecessary CRM's that don't work for your integration, and instead of moving to a more flexible CRM you then buy an overlay that also doesn't work fully. Then complain when your connector platform costs too much money. You're hemmorhaging money in useless and incoherent tech stacks that don't flow cohesively and as an Operating officer you have no idea that it's inefficient. You don't have a plan to optimize, when pushed on helping, you refuse, and at the end of the day, you're acting as a glorified TAM but being labelled a COO. Your CTO is amazing but hamstrung by other leadership, he has vision, direction, goals for the future, but those are usually just ignored by superiors. He knows what the product is, knows what it's capable of, and has a vision for the future clouded by the CEO's pigeonholing into specific industries. Your Head of Data as they are called is also an amazing human, kind, smart, efficient, knows what the product should be but is equally bogged down by the idea the CEO wants the product to be outsourced data analysis. You literally have AI that can build things for you but you unnecessarily create case inflow for something you can copy and paste into the AI and build it for you. Your onboarding manager is the best human ever. I highly respect their judgment, their focus, their ACTUAL kindness, and their dedication to the customer experience. The data analysts are also incredible, they know what the product is, some will set effective boundaries with leadership when more work is shoved on them, and unfortunately they're also stuck by the higher ups. One will act as a manager and will randomize and micromanage to the nth degree, will snap at you if you ask questions, will pull you out of a flow constantly by reminding you of a response that was sent a minute earlier that you already read but deprioritized to work on something of higher importance, aka a higher ARR account that has been waiting for significantly longer. Think about it like this, I built a kanban of prioritized case responses and the second I start a to do, I'm being drug into a case with less time opened and lower ARR which is a simple answer. The kanban board is effectively useless if the person is going to drag you into other cases mid-flow. Micromanaging is and always will be a horrible way to do something, be better. I could drive down time to resolution (TTR) 50% by my calculations in 6 months by getting on calls with each customer and hashing out each problem then splitting each issue out into multiple cases, Which brings me to the next biggest problem. Their case cleanliness on the success side is atrocious. Look to see 10 issues in one case without splitting each issue into it's own case. You bring up asking to just hop on a quick call with the customer to demo and resolve issue in one touch? You're told no and to just focus on emails...which creates more emails...which creates more issues...instead of a 1hr call to resolve the issue, they will force you to turn a 1hr 1 touch case into a sprawling multi-day case. Which is wild to me when the CEO is so focused on TTR but doesn't address the obvious elephant in the room. Get.on.the.phone. Get the initial ask, get on a call, fix it, and the 10 other issues. Split each of the 10 issues into their own case, provide the issue and a detailed resolution then instantly close. Don't like that 10 other people get on the call? Easy fix. Ask one person to get on the call and to have them distill that information. If that doesn't work, run an effective meeting by pausing when multiple people speak up and herd the cats. Or...set boundarires. It's meetings 101, when you got 10 people in a room, you find the one that distills all the info, and you focus on them for the call and ignore the noise. If others bring up relevant points, you add to your OneNote folder for the customer and read it back to them while also adding their name so they know you're listening and care enough to remember their name. You don't drive up your TTR because you have no idea how to handle a large meeting room. Especially when your TTR is so poor. The company has an amazing product ran by incompetent C-suite management (except the CTO) that doesn't understand process is necessary to onboard new teammates, to handoff accounts instead of bluntly shoving them onto you and not building trust with the customer, and ultimately if you come in as a TAM, look to get micromanaged to no end, snapped at for asking basic questions like "which case are we referring to" and met with "LITERALLY THE ONE WE WERE TALKING ABOUT AN HOUR AGO", and ultimately told you aren't a good fit all for trying to point out the gaps that are plainly evident. The CEO does not see what the company can be and instead goes for the most pigeonholed version of the product imaginable. You have a product that could be making a million a month in MRR per customer but instead you run a hopelessly dated subscription model with no add-ons and a woefully unstructured sales playbook.