talented engineers - poor management - heavy pm process - stagnant career growth
Pros
Was honored to join Relativity and drive product roadmap, Relativity is tackling the toughest legal eDiscovery challenges, Got to work on exciting features and initiatives, Some of the brightest and most dedicated software engineers I've ever worked with. Relentless pursuit of creating and maintaining a highly available and reliable cloud native platform, obsessive about maintaining healthy customer incident budgets. Very mature devops. All the tooling and telemetry a PM could dream of. Rapid adoption of AI for not only agentic SDLC, but also product discovery and operations. Great benefits and very flexible when it comes to DTO.
Cons
When they say Relativity is a gym and not a spa, please believe it, it's a meat grinder. Tough demoralizing culture, bled some really talented and tenured senior peiple... and backfills are slow. Highly specialized feature/sub-feature verticals, creates silos, sometimes no ownership of e2e customer experience, makes it challenging to get things done. Poor disciple around WIP, when everything is a priority nothing is a priority. Still maintains program management for certain workstreams, the org hasn't figured out how to stop doing waterfall and adapt something like SAFe. On the product ops side, a lot of process is driven top-down, versus bottom up with a robust Community of Practice. Translates to high burden, non-customer value add work for PMs. Waaaaay too many artifacts involved, waaay over-indexed on 'keeping stakeholders informed' across disparate systems and channels, compounded by a deep and fragmented network of business stakeholders. Release by committee mindset, often need to choose between release without notes vs deferred release of feature enhancements. No PO or business analyst support, PMs must operate simultaneously at both the tactical and strategic level, and support both inbound and outbound functions. Well-meaning culture of 'don't bring a problem unless you have a solution' to foster ownership mindset, but applied rigidly and discourages feedback loops. Mid-level product leadership seems more focused on tactics vs career development. No solicitation for skip-level reviews, which seems to indicate little interest in getting direct report feedback to improve management function and overall employee experience. And as others here have noted, once you land in a role, settle in, and don't expect a promotion any time soon. Even though there are well-structured promotion pathways and documented competency rubrics, there is very little transparency into the process, and promotion is highly dependent on domain dynamics and manager preferences versus individual merit and peer reviews.
