If I could take back my 2 years, I would. - Anonymous employee Medallia Employee Review

1.0
Mar 23, 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Some truly empathetic people have been drawn together because of Medallia's worthy mission of "Creating a world where companies are loved by their customers and employees".

Cons

For context, I was on the product team. Given the mission, it's ironic how little Medallia leadership seems to care about it's employees or it's customers. This is the first company in my 15+ year career, that I actively discourage others from considering. They talk a great game, about culture... about caring about their people, but numerous occasions suggest otherwise. For one re-org, a well-respected senior manager found out he was being let go... from his reports. Another very senior leader was simply replaced by a much less accomplished and respected yes-man. In this case, I know first hand that there had not been any performance issues. Needless to say, a mass exodus followed. For many ICs, countless hours and ridiculous workloads go completely unacknowledged by the CEO, who wishes he was a "product guy" so he should presumably be close enough to recognize these efforts. Of course they (he) also talks a great game, about product... but it's a joke. First, the tech debt is astonishing. Seriously, unbelievable. As in you won't believe it until you make a ridiculously reasonable request and get a multi-sprint estimate from eng. Secondly, and perhaps most frustratingly, the entire strategy is rooted in a "please the whale" client service mindset. They struggle to hire any PMs with a true background in actually shipping product. There just is no long term scalable product vision. And finally, for a company with a mission about being loved by customers, they talk a great game about loving their customers, but the insulting state of their user experience is SHOCKINGLY bad. We're talking buttons that require a checkbox with labels like "don't push this unless you know what you're doing". Tacit tribal knowledge is also par for the course, so trying to learn the system is a hard won badge of honor which the original engineers use as gateway for engaging in any meaningful questioning of what has been built. In my opinion, they hide behind a refrain of "honor the complexity" so as to not have to tackle real underlying neglected object models. If I could take back the two years I spent there, I would. In hindsight, it was a career mistake. My biggest learnings were about how to better vet a great "sounding" tech company going forward. And that's a good lesson. My advice to anyone already there: don't sit it out worried that it's you not "getting it" or not appropriately "honoring the complexity"; it's not you – it's a bad environment with crappy tech and no real product strategy. Get out.

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Medallia Response
9y
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. I am sorry to hear about your experience, but know that I do sincerely appreciate your effort and contribution while you were here. You are spot on that as we grow and scale, we will experience changes. It's true that there have been some team changes recently. As a company grows and expands, the needs and skill sets required by a boot-strapped start-up are different from a growing global mid-sized company. I appreciate that scaling may have impacted some of our people. That said, valuing people is one of our core values at Medallia. If you’re open to sharing, I’d like to hear about what you talked about in your review. Please contact me directly. That said, I also need to defend our Product team. While I appreciate your feelings shared, the fact is that the caliber of our R&D organization is at an all-time high, the Partnership between Product, Design, and Engineering has never been stronger, and our delivery reliability and quality has never been better. I’m sorry you experience at Medallia was not a positive one, hopefully you can find a role that enables you to grow and succeed in the future. - Borge Hald, CEO & Co-Founder

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