Smart People, Cutting Edge Technology, Fast Culture - Product Management Eze Software Employee Review

As a veteran in the financial technology industry I've worked at a number of solution providers and without a doubt Eze is leaps and bounds above their peers. This is a challenging industry as hedge funds and asset managers are under enormous pressure to deliver results and the complexity of the the modern financial ecosystem means they are completely beholden to the software solutions they use. You simply cannot exist as an investment manager without a complex collection of software solutions and service providers that have to work together seamlessly for a single trade to to be entered, executed, cleared and properly valued from an accounting standpoint. This is a rewarding space to operate in because the problems are challenging and the solutions all the more rewarding. Relations with clients can run incredibly deep because in many ways you're in the trenches together, but make no mistake some of these folk can be tough. Where many tech providers in the financial space get it wrong is in one of two ways 1) They are completely beholden to their clients and sales. There is no real innovation or strategy, rather sales or management promises anything under the sun and R&D is essentially on-demand professional services, building whatever the latest sign wants. The tech stack suffers and R&D gets frustrated at their inability to execute a cohesive plan to keep up with technology and market trends and is exhausted by constant support 2) R&D is disconnected from the clients. To prevent number 1 (usually because they went down that path and overcorrected), R&D becomes walled off behind processes that insulate them from clients' day to day. The problem is that no one knows how the hell the software is actually used, so barring an enormous investment of PM time, R&D folk spend their time building gilded castles that no one really needs while service spends their life hacking together solutions so that clients can actually manage their business, frustrating all concerned Threading the needle between these is difficult and while it wouldn't be accurate to say Eze is the only solution provider to manage this, they undoubtedly do it the best. What Eze Gets Right 1) Culture - Certainly different part of the business and regions differ, but overall they have a get-it-done culture. This is one of the most externally facing companies I've worked at. No organization is without politics, but they are pretty minimal at Eze. Folks here are deeply passionate, anchored by employees who've worked at Eze for 15-20 years, and everyone is focused externally on solving market problems and the problems of clients. Whereas some companies departments and product groups are run like feudal fiefs with managers caring as much about internal optics as the broader business, that is emphatically not the case at Eze. If you need help anyone in the organization will give it to you. People share knowledge freely and work toward common goals, learning from mistakes without the blame game that causes so much time to be wasted on CYA at other firms. There's also a lot of focus on the importance of people which makes a fun culture, which I appreciate coming from some firms that were all business. Leads can expense team lunches and pre-pandemic there were free drinks and snack, beer time on Friday and Bagels on Wednesday. There's a yearly auction for charity where people take time to come up with crazy ideas for "services" or stuff that folk can bid on. There's also a lot of focus on diversity with meet-ups and celebrations. Management is not perfect (what company's is) but there's a real effort to listen to feedback and invest time and effort into their employees Smart Dedicated Peers - Just about everyone is smart and hard-working at Eze, particularly on the business and R&D side, and some are brilliant. Expect to learn on your feet and to bring your A-game. There is a high bar for performance and your peers more than anyone else will challenge you to dial it to 11 at times 2) Strategic Thinking, Risk Tolerance and Big Bets - How many firms take a successful product making lots of money and say, we see the direction technology is taking, so lets invest millions of dollars and years of R&D time to re-write the whole thing from the ground up in AWS? While we're at it lets do it right and use a bleeding edge microservice architecture pioneered by the likes of Facebook and Netflix, which our engineering team has no real experience in though we know its a technology stack never employed for an investment management solution, which will require a complete paradigm shift in just about every facet of development and delivery. That's the bet Eze took years ago with Eclipse and the result, which is closing in on 200 clients having doubled each year since its proper launch in 2018, had mind-blown emojis being thrown out at a recent DockerCon presentation. This is a company not afraid to take risks and where innovation and technology are taken seriously. People keep up with what's happening in the industry and in technology, tech debt is paid down not compounding interest, and management greenlights learning experiments with no immediate value beyond knowledge like the recent learning foray into ML-based trade analytics. There are yearly call for growth ideas where anyone can put their ideas into the pot and a yearly innovation challenge where R&D is put on hold for 2 days to let self-forming teams compete for prizes and bragging rights for delivering the best solution they can think up to a problem they define related to the business. Winners and sometimes runners up are routinely folded into the product solutions. But really its more deep seated than these examples. Given the choice of a "hacky" short term solution vs. doing something the right way, a lot of tech firms choose the former, cheaper path and the solutions start to wobble over time like a house of cards. Eze generally does things the right way for long term scalable solutions, because there is a strong engineering culture and folk know management has their back. 3) Client Focus But Just Say No - Talk to clients all the time, listen to what they say because they know more than you do about their problems. Deliver thoughtful solutions to those problems quickly when the solutions are easy. Deliver solutions to those problem as quick as you can when they are not easy but only when the solution aligns with strategic priorities and direction. Otherwise say no. Say no a lot, and know that management has your back. So simple but how few firms practice this 4) Work Life Balance - Pre-Covid the firm had a work from home policy and more recently all of SS&C moved to unlimited vacation days. Management encourages employees to take the time and recharge, and is VERY understanding of personal issues or life events needing time (for example moving, medical issues etc.). They really do emphasize employees first in that regard. No one really cares the hours you work and whether you cut out early Friday to attend your son's soccer game (pre-Covid) or need to take care of an errand during the day and they want you to take your vacation days. So they are flexible in terms of work life balance in that regard. When things come up outside work that you need time to manage you will get the time and wont be judged for it because they could care less how much time you spend chained to the computer or at your desk. What matters is results. With that said make no mistake that this is a hard-driving firm, and chances are you will work long hours for stretches because stuff has to get done and you'll be invested in the results and your peers will all be similarly invested. Most people thrive in that kind of environment, but if you are of the punch-clock mentality where you put in your 8 hours on the dot and 1 hour of that is watching YouTube videos, be advised Eze is probably not for you. Most people aren't like that though. Most people, particularly in R&D want to work on cutting edge tech, have a voice in what gets made and have the rush of delivering real software that actually makes a difference in the hands of users and the broader world. Toward that end finance sometimes gets a bad rap. People think of "wall street" with a broad brush based on new stories from the financial crisis or Gamestop non-sense, thinking its all about rich people without really understanding the inner workings. Asset managers and hedge funds though serve a real world function, one much more compelling than many industries. Really they are pretty much the same, flip sides of a single coin, managing the same money but doing it in different ways, the nuances of which would take more breadth than this rating to explain. Some of that money comes from the wealthy, but most doesn't. Most ultimately comes from pension funds, university endowments, insurance companies so they can pay out claims, or individual investors through ETFs and mutual funds and their 401Ks. Retired firemen and teachers get paid because these firms manage portions of the money they paid in over the years and businesses like Tesla Google, Amazon and Walmart exist because these firms used that money to purchase the shares and debt they issued. Sure there are some are bad actors as in any industry and some of the CEOs of the successful hedge funds and asset managers are rich, the ones you usually see on TV, but again that's any industry. Most aren't though. There are thousands of hedge funds and asset managers out there. Most of them are small, and the people who work there are doing a hard and stressful job, decently paid but far from rich. Helping make these people's jobs easier through better software seems pretty compelling to me in terms of doing good by the world. Sure helping hospitals manage their patients might rank higher on the cosmic scale, but it sure beats finding a new way to sell pet food or tricks to waste people's time so you can sell it to advertisers.