Know what you are getting into. - Software Engineer Prodigy Education Employee Review

Thank you for taking the time to post. We appreciate your personal experience of more than four years with us is very subjective - every employee’s experience is unique - and feel it’s important to share additional perspective and clarity on some of the topics you’ve raised. Just as with this review, we sincerely appreciate it when team members take the time to share their feedback on Glassdoor. It helps in two ways: (1) in ensuring that people have an avenue for feedback beyond our Slack channels, polls and surveys, AMAs, and live Q&As and (2) in helping us learn more about how team members prefer to communicate. We do occasionally highlight the fact that our Prodigy Glassdoor page exists and invite people to post if they feel appropriate, but to your point, this is neither mandatory or incentivized. Glassdoor is a great way for current team members and alumni to comment on our workplace and culture in an open and transparent way. Prodigy is very much focused on game-based learning. We regularly present new game features and initiatives at All Hands presentations, with our philosophy of ‘Motivation First!’ core to our approach. In all feature development, failure is an important part of the journey, helping us to validate or rethink new ideas and theories. We embrace risk and failure and openly admit when something hasn’t worked as planned - then we pivot. Everything we do is a learning process and with the response and engagement we see from our users, we’re confident that we’re taking the right approach. We continually strive to improve our students’ experience with our product. This is strongly tied to our culture value of being User Obsessed and is also directly linked to our mission to help every student in the world love learning. Creating and sustaining a great student experience is integral to that mission. We absolutely need revenue to grow and thrive, and to reinvest in new learning experiences for our users - none of which can be achieved without a great user experience. Regarding long hours, we are working diligently to ensure priorities and workloads are managed accordingly, with team members encouraged to come forward if that balance isn’t right. We take your feedback about long hours very seriously - not only has the impact of increasing workload become a global issue, but it is extremely counter-culture at Prodigy. The pandemic has meant we've all had to learn and manage a new way of working. We all need to take an active role in setting boundaries and carving out productivity time. Leverage our 10:30-3 core hours for meetings and block the rest in your calendar. Work with meeting requestors to find time within those hours wherever possible. There are things that Prodigy needs to do to help manage workload and we’re actively and intentionally reducing and reprioritizing our strategic plans to ensure that we’re targeting our collective energy at a manageable set of objectives. In addition to our core hours of 10:30-3 and Deep Work periods, we’ve introduced additional time off for team members to help us all to take time and recharge. Overall, we need to learn new ways to establish our boundaries with work, and work needs to give us ways to do that. We’re continuing to figure out how to achieve this balance together, as our environment changes. We’ll close on the topic of diversity because the comment regarding our leadership is categorically false. Our executive leadership team is diverse in nature, including men, women and people of colour, and we are working with our retained EDI Consultant to ensure that equity, diversity and inclusion are cemented into our foundation across people, process and product. We launched our EDI Deep-Dive in August-September and learned that we have incredibly diverse teams across Prodigy. We represent 3 countries (where we are currently living), 33 languages, 12 ethnicities, 15 racial groups, 11 religious and spiritual affiliation, and 6 gender identities. We also learned that we have opportunities to improve equity and elevate diversity in our first- and mid-level management teams which is an integral part of the foundation we’re building. There is a great deal of work - learning, growing, building - to be done before we can truly celebrate our EDI efforts and accomplishments. We are working hard to become the best version of ourselves and appreciate the engagement of all of our team members, including our Allies who help move us forward.