Pros
Before highlighting the pros: - I shall do my best to provide examples - 3 out of the first 4 reviews are misleading and grossly positive. There is some truth in them, but they are devoid of serious issues which plagued my experience. Issues had I been made aware of, I would not have joined and avoided a career blunder. I, among many others. Fair Positives - Impressively intelligent and talented people with diverse professional backgrounds - Beautiful, spacious office with plenty of plants, multiple kitchens and conference rooms - The business generates revenue and has clients - Daily snacks are provided with catered lunches on Fridays - No competition between colleagues and visible, real friendships - Convenient office location - The founder / CEO, is gifted in persuasion and is truly intelligent. Investors and clients love her because she can make them believe anything, even if entirely untrue (more often than one would reckon). Her strength of persuasion is what has led to successful recruitment of exceptional talent. Her appreciation for and sense of fashion is elegant and sophisticated. Her unquestionable top quality is her work ethic. I cannot imagine how she functions consistently with minimal sleep.
Cons
Two buckets for the cons: the CEO related (75%) and Narrativ-wide cons (25%) CEO related - Lack of respect for employees’ time and their work – always late to meetings. It is no exaggeration she will be hours late for her meetings and will constantly modify calendars. Will schedule meetings for late at night. Slacks/e-mails on frivolous matters during the weekend and odd hours. Classifies everything as important and urgent. In my experience, most of it is somewhat important and most certainly not urgent. Disregards the amount of effort put into people’s work and repeatedly changes her mind. Creates ludicrous amount of unnecessary work and wastes time. Ultimately, if she doesn’t like it, she will just not use the work, despite it being exactly as she requested. One might create a whole process to bring on new clients and it will likely never get used. - Has a scary mindset that she owns employees and they owe her their lives – will not acknowledge that they may have families or lives outside of work and that their stake in the company is meaningfully different. Unreasonable and unfair to ask your employees to work as hard as you when they are already putting in above and beyond effort. - Condescending – will speak to you as if you are inept. - Only her opinion matters – once her mind is made up on something, good luck changing it. If you try, then you may end up with the 5+ senior level departures/firings since February 2019. None of which have been replaced. Does not value radical feedback. - Unprofessional – will speak negatively about former employees AND current employees to other employees. Really thinks everyone is inept, unless she likes you. - Demoralizing / unnecessary stress / bully-ish behavior – will ask someone a question and that person won’t have an answer. She will then keep on asking follow-up questions to demonstrate to the person how useless they are instead of effectively providing the answer and guiding them through her thought process. Sometimes it is a joint problem solve, but mostly it is the former. Colleagues will leave meetings with her demoralized and unmotivated. - Extreme micromanagement – gets involved in everything, no matter how mundane the task may be. Lacks trust in her team and wants to be looped in on everything. Created an alias for her email and asked the team to copy that alias for every single client email so she can monitor every conversation… Asks the team to make Trello boards of their to-do lists so she can monitor everything being worked on, but then never looks at it. Asks everyone to send an end of day email that explicitly writes out everything they worked on for the day, what they will work on tomorrow, and what they didn’t get done. Demands excess visibility, but also will use it to scold you for something random regularly. Disturbing thing is it is unclear why she wants to get involved in everyone’s, especially the junior business team’s, minor work and hover over everything. No trust. This is not good for employee morale and does not build confidence. - PowerPoint presentations – prefers words and sentences everywhere. Instead of presenting and using the slides as a supplement, she must have everything written out on the slides and unnecessarily complicated. - Favoritism – as the other review said, Narrativ is truly a meritocracy. That is only the case if Shirley likes you. You can have the best ideas, but if you’re not her on her favored list, then they will be viewed as meaningless. Someone on her favorite side can say the same thing and then suddenly it becomes incredible. - Lies / misleads too comfortably - No ownership over negative results. Prefers to blame others, especially previous employees Narrativ related - Stress radiates from top of org, creating a toxic work environment where people would rather not come to work, put in headphones, and leave as soon as they can - High turnover – careers are ruined. People leave their jobs only to get fired within months. Role will be defined to them as one thing and then the actual job and expectations will vary significantly. - No training for new people to learn the convoluted business model - Junior business team comes from similar analytical backgrounds and does not respect seniors with many more years of valuable experience from different, not as technical backgrounds - Expect to work late consistently and during weekends – undeniably the worst hours I have worked through all of my career - Complicated business that most of the employees don't understand - Low morale, “keep boss happy” culture without autonomy over anything because nothing is ever good enough. No reward for the risk. I encourage you to ask these questions for any recruiting process, but certainly do so here. If you are going through the process and doing diligence, make sure you: - Question everything, especially any numbers coming from CEO, no matter how compelling it may sound. Probe the website and really get more details on the claims - Ask about revenue/customers/traffic growth over the past 12-18 months. Since it is retail, there are outlier months so be mindful of what is being presented - Ask how many people have been hired in 2019 vs fired or quit on the business and executive teams. Request elaboration on the firings/departures of the 5+ senior positions and replacements for those positions. Question how they were set up for success. - IMPERATIVE you negotiate a severance package. Cannot stress this enough, given the high turnover - Question how the auction platform actually works and what human element is involved (if any at all) - Question growth strategy and what has prevented realization (if that is the case, which I am not saying is). Ask which products have been released and how they have impacted business value + roadmap - Can you articulate what Narrativ does, why it's currently valuable, and how it will increase in value? If not, would advise you to keep asking questions - Realistically, how many hours are you expected to work? You will receive the cliché answer: as long as the work is done, hours won't matter. Given it is a startup, there will be always work so would absolutely understand realistic expectations to see if it will be a good fit or not. Truly do your diligence so you are fully aware of what you're signing up for. Why am I doing this? Too many of us have left our jobs for Narrativ and ended up w/ a miserable and unfair outcome. Simply wish we had known these things.