Product Management:
Catalyst is trying really hard to pivot to a product development mindset right now and is kind of stumbling. But I trust we will get through this! Turns out the company seems to be more of a "consulting" company building analytic visualizations in Tableau or Qlik that are custom to a specific client (e.g. not actual software). As the company pivots to building “software products”, the company needs to re-think how the company is staffed, e.g. product managers, designers, software engineers, support, etc.. as well as re-thinking how these software products scale across clients. There also doesn’t seem to be someone that actually “owns” the product development strategy and the overall product roadmap. There all these “technologies” that we have but I don’t seem to know who “owns” how all these get incorporated into a cohesive product strategy.
My perception is that there are so many "directors", "managers" and "VPs" and not enough "boots on the ground" and appropriately skilled contributors. If we're going to be a "product company" we certainly aren't staffing these product teams accordingly e.g. software developers, QA, actual "worker bees" (for lack of a better phrase).
We also don’t seem to have a CTO. We have a “CTO council” that seems to decide things by “committee” e.g. big tech/architecture decisions. This, to me, is an example of where sometimes the idea of “collaboration” can be a little too much and hinder actual productivity.
Culture:
For the most part, people seem to live the values of the company. However, one of the things I’d recommend keeping any eye on is a “culture of blame” that I’m starting to see. In certain cases where I’ve seen something go wrong, there’s been this knee-jerk reaction to blame someone right away before pausing and doing an actual root cause investigation of the issue. I wish in these cases the focus was more about learning and how to be better instead of adding to the culture of blame.
Diversity:
I wish the company was more diverse. Catalyst has a blog post that references the business case for diversity and the work that we need to do. There is some good work that is starting to happen and the intentions of the company around diversity and inclusion are, no doubt, sincere and well-meaning! But I fear that there’s a lot of conversation about diversity happening at the leadership level that is happening, without an actual diverse group to help inform the discussion on what it means to be a diverse company.