Indeed is a poster child for what "growing fast" looks like... and what not to do. During my time there, they 10x'd both headcount (from 1100 to 11k) and revenue (400M to 4B). And with that growth came a lot of pain - unreasonable expectations, fast promotions for people that weren't ready, and empire building like crazy. I had the misfortune to end up working for not one, but three terribly incompetent middle-managers. All seemed to have "good intentions" and promised to "value coaching", but had zero interest in trying to understand what I was working on, give me guidance, or actually invest in my career. After four years, I was managing a team of four and running six engineering teams but still had an entry-level IC title and mediocre salary, and was just told I needed to "do more" by my idiot of a boss who got promoted to director in less than three years and who described the sum of his responsibilities as "providing updates to management" to one of my frustrated directs.
Everywhere I looked around the company, I saw the living embodiment of the "peter principle" - managers who rose to the level of their incompetence. The product org doubled down on micro A/B tests; I was recently told by a good friend who still works there that the most innovative thing to come out of Indeed in the past 5 years was to switch from "pay per click" to "pay per apply". I learned too late, as a platform PM focused on building internal tools, that the only sure route to promotion was to run a few dozen A/B tests that moved conversion rates from 3.79% to 3.84%. At the end of my time at Indeed, I was working 80 hours a week and all my manager could suggest in areas of improvement when I asked what it would take to get promoted to Senior Product Manager was "do more". A few months later I was a Senior Product Manager at Amazon, and now I'm a Director of Product.
In recent years, leadership has brought in a bunch of jargon-spouting MBA consultant types for high-paying senior director and VP roles, basically ruining any chance for real impact among hard-working PMs who want to move up. It seems much of this stems from putting a former sales leader in charge of their enterprise product development, and due to the leader of the SMB unit's personal biases (he has an ivy-league MBA, so therefore...).
If you're looking for a steady paycheck and some free food, and don't mind dealing with a ton of misguided requests raining down on you demanding results, look no further. Otherwise... there are better options out there.
