Product Managers: RUN! - Product Manager Klaviyo Employee Review

Let me start with some objective facts, and then move on to my subjective takes on Klaviyo. First, some objective facts: - In the mid-year review cycle of 2024, zero Product Managers were promoted in an org of 40+ team members - ICs at the SPM level and above must participate in a mandatory incident response rotation, spanning overnight periods, weekends, and holidays. This is not something they mention during the hiring process. - Employees are required to be in-office 3 days per week and the CEO has verbally shared plans to increase this to 5 days per week in 2025 - Product Managers are evaluated based on the number of specs they write. The CEO is fond of saying that “a spec can be written in a day” and as a result, “Product Managers should be publishing over 10 specs per month.” - The number of IC PMs who have been promoted into management roles over the past 2 years is close to zero - The CEO exerts enormous control over the R&D organization; he is nominally the CPO, CTO, and Head of Design - The number of different areas of investment is very high. In recent years there have been at least 9 different growth strategies pursued in parallel, with no cohesive framework for how these different strategies come together. - The R&D org spends nearly all of its time trying to align on priorities and rearrange roadmaps. Each planning cycle, managers work through org-wide spreadsheet exercises, horse-trading, and an extremely high volume of escalations. - As part of the IPO, the CEO retains a special class of shares that provides him and his co-founder with an outsized share of voting rights. As a result, it is very unlikely that he can be pushed out by the board. Now for some color commentary: The CEO is a problem. He found success early on as a determined founder with strong product instincts, but now that the company has gone public and grown to 1k+ employees, he seems unable to adapt to managing a large organization. First, he’s unwilling to delegate any decision-making to empower his teams. He doesn’t hire quality people in leadership positions, presumably because he doesn’t want anyone who will challenge him. He gets temperamental at the first sign of disagreement or original thought. The CTO and Head of Design were recently let go, the VP of Product is an administrative figurehead, and the R&D management layer is staffed mostly with “yes” people. This lack of trust creates a culture of fear and incentivizes managers to pass blame to their team members to save face. There are truly toxic examples of this all over the org. Second, he is - to be blunt - scatter-brained. He really struggles with focus, and communicating with him is challenging as he shifts topics rapidly and frequently. His written communication often borders on incoherent. This “quirkiness” is reflected in the R&D roadmap, as teams are fragmented to inch forward on 100 different fronts rather than going deep on a handful of key initiatives. As a result, there’s no clear vision for the company, nor is there any clarity on business outcomes we’re driving toward. Instead, the R&D org is perpetually adjusting to the latest whims of the CEO. Compounding these issues within the Product org specifically, he holds PMs in particularly low regard. He believes that engineers should be able to take on Product work and encourages them to do so, which creates confusion and tension at the team level. Product Directors tend to be deferential to their peers in Engineering, have little say in resourcing and often struggle to influence prioritization. As a result, it’s common for IC PMs to encounter resistance within their own teams, as many EMs are encouraged by their leaders to exert control over the roadmap. Over the course of the past year he’s implemented policies that appear aimed at driving PMs out of the company without actually executing layoffs. The Engineer-to-PM ratio has tripled, with many SPMs managing across 3 or more unrelated engineering teams, resulting in 50+ hour work weeks, 60+ in crunch time. The career ladder has frozen, with promotions being denied across the entire Product org in a blanket decision by the CEO. Simply put, Klaviyo is a terrible place for Product Managers looking to advance their skills or learn on the job, and the CEO is openly hostile toward the Product org.