Logitech Reviews

The politics and lack of empowerment. The Mississauga office is an incredibly political environment, in the negative sense of the word. Very little seems to get done through the well publicized processes, but rather anything accomplished is done through political machinations, and verbally sabotaging other projects with senior management to get resources for your own project. It is a very stressful environment, where immediate turn around is expected on complex work, and "No" or "let me think about it" are not acceptable answers. Work life balance is not a consideration -- work is expected to come first, at all times of the day, and you are expected to feel privileged for being given the opportunity to work at Logitech. Project management in the development area is almost non-existant, and is focused more on presenting what senior management wants to hear rather than managing projects and risks, and presenting the facts to management. A few years ago this division was very development centric, and a stronger product management role was needed. New senior management was brought in and they addressed this issue by giving product management complete say over everything, but did not hire, nor train product managers to assume this role. While this is a difficult situation for other functions, I feel most sorry for product managers who are now required to make every decision. Overall this is a very stressful place to work, and it takes a special person who knows how to work a corrupt system and who has a thick skin in the face of political attacks to succeed here.

Incapable Project Managers; too many unproductive meetings, PM's that require babysitting by their own manager (doesn't that inspire confidence?). Projects that are apparently run by two or more PM's at the same time (and who really knows which controls the project), PM's who don't understand what they are being told (or don't want to), others who couldn't motivate a dog to wag its own tail. Product Managers who have their heads so far up each others asses that they haven't got a clue what they really want in a product, or from their engineers. Perhaps that's not fair - they want everything, they want it now, and they don't want to spend any money to get it. While there are elements to this that constitute so-called "good business practice", Logitech's Project Managers seem to take this to extremes, resulting in an endless barrage of complex functional requirements with ridiculous cost and schedule restrictions - you can't spec-out, design, build, and validate a "10x Customer Experience" on $2 worth of (mostly new) hardware in 5 months. Especially when you are STILL SPECCCING IT OUT (hardware and software) with 5 months to go until Feature Complete. Lack of respect. I observed an employee asking the PM for assistance with collecting some data in order to produce a valid document required for a project Gate transition. The manager proceeded to explain that "we're a team", "we're all in this together", and that the employee should stop using the word "I" and get his work done. Ultimately, this employee was unable to accomplish the task effectively, and was called down for it. I later had a similar experience with this same so-called leader.