Prodigy Education

1.0

Dec 13, 2018

Anonymous employee

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

• Easy product to believe in: helping every child in the world love math

Cons

• Inexperienced people in leadership / management positions. Inexperienced leaders then turning around and hiring more inexperienced leaders... • Benefits and vacation policy are sub-par compared to most tech startups. • Office is either very warm or very cold, unwelcoming and unfinished - Prodigy does not prioritize the perks which tend to make employees happy or engaged in an office. • Most of the HR or People Ops team (usually the people reading / responding to these glassdoor reviews) are not formally trained and lack professional experience in HR or people management. • As a squad member, you have very little autonomy to make decisions and help direct the product. • They encourage transparent feedback, but they only hear what they want to hear. In the company “All Hands” meetings, the co-founders almost get angry or offended if people aren’t brave enough to come forward and ask questions in front of the entire company. • Prodigy uses something called “SMART” goals to measure your professional growth. It’s a list you write of things you’ve done or learned to advance yourself professionally (read books, take courses, etc). Although this can be encouraging at first, what isn’t directly communicated is that you’re expected to complete these goals outside of core work hours. Essentially Prodigy will reward you based on the time and effort you put into “yourself” (thereby benefiting the company), but *only* on your own time.

Prodigy Education Response

Thanks for taking the time to write this review. We’re sincerely sorry you had a negative experience working with us. You’ve actually noted a few key areas we’re currently working to improve. These are: -Supporting managers, so that they’re equipped to support team members. We’re running bi-weekly management sessions about important topics, from having effective conversations with team members to giving team members proper guidance when handling new tasks and projects. -Improving our benefits. We’re working closely with our benefits provider, and are launching a new plan soon! It’s going to contain a lot of improvements based on feedback from team members across the organization. -Hiring an experienced Director of Agile. He is working to support squads, improve development processes and coach new managers. He also runs a quarterly anonymous squad health check, where the results are used to improve process and the environment throughout Prodigy. This includes giving team members more autonomy to make decisions regarding squad priorities. -Hiring more senior talent and leadership. We’re diligently searching for VPs of Sales and Engineering, as well as more leadership for other departments. Regarding your note about SMART Goals, team members can absolutely opt out of them. However, we promote them because they: -Are our primary method for ensuring team members can meet their self-identified career goals as quickly as possible -Help ensure both the manager and team member agree on the importance of work being completed, reducing shifts in priorities and communication breakdowns -Allow managers to give specific feedback on how team members can improve and solve problems -Promote the setting of ambitious -- yet achievable -- personal goals that ultimately drive company, team and career development If you want to give us more feedback, especially concerning behaviours that you felt were toxic, you’re more than welcome to follow up with our head of People Ops, Sarah-Jayne Lehtinen, or our Sr HR Manager, Tara Poirier, through email. - Prodigy People Ops

Inexperienced leadership making mistakes and tolerating toxic behaviour. - Anonymous employee Prodigy Education Employee Review

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