Management is creating a culture that lacks transparency and clarity in terms of company and product direction. The parent company, Peaksware, has grown a lot in recent years, but through acquisition rather than typical growth. As such they are acquiring brands/technologies that they do not understand as well, and they are trying to apply processes/techniques to domains/products that are different from what they are used to without acknowledging and recognizing where there might need to be differences.
Upper management seems to be trying to manage the company like when it was a much smaller company in that the small executive group are trying to manage the day to day operations of teams rather than empowering middle management and the teams themselves by providing business context and allowing them to work towards that. Not surprisingly the executives do not have the time for this micro-management, and so teams are left with unclear direction and middle management are left questioning their purpose/role since they have little authority and are left out of the loop in terms of where things are supposed to be headed. Pointing this out or questioning direction and lack of transparency is not looked favorably on by the tight knit upper management group, and even high level key stakeholders from the sub companies are excluded from strategy and planning sessions relating to their products.
Additionally, the company takes advantage of the fact that employees are drawn to the company because of the product domain of each brand (musicians at MakeMusic, athletes at TrainingPeaks, etc.), and so compensation is below average, especially for junior level employees (interns and interns who are converted to full time employees are paid very little and there is very little effort to correct this as these employees demonstrate growth). This seems to be a conscious strategy.
