I know it sounds silly and idealistic, but I came to Keypath with a lot of optimism: on my first day, I truly thought to myself, “This is the last company I’m ever going to work for.” The experience at my previous employer had been the most negative I’d ever had professionally, so when I started at Keypath, I was brimming with enthusiasm. To wit, it was made clear during my interview that the company was focused on improvement. The message was loud and clear: If you think we’re doing anything wrong, please let us know. Keypath was a small company rapidly becoming a medium-sized company, so decisions would need to be made about whether established processes could be scaled or not. Part of my job would be to make informed suggestions about changing the way things were into the way they could be. It was a daunting and exciting challenge, but I was looking forward to it.
Unfortunately, my optimism turned out to be misplaced and mistaken. Keypath is company where informed experience, change, and optimism go to die.
MARKETING
The first project I was tasked with was evaluation of all the published blog content on the websites I was tasked with managing. When I found the quality of that content was poor (blogs were short, missing CTAs, out of date stats and info, poorly written, dull, etc.), I was asked to create a blogging best practices SOP to ensure SEO optimization from the get-go. Completion of this project revealed a core problem that exists in Keypath’s marketing team: siloing that engenders and us vs. them mentality between the content and SEO teams.
In the simplest terms, Keypath’s content team is overworked and understaffed, and, at that time, suffered from a severe lack of leadership. This meant what leadership existed was focused on keeping the workload manageable, which in practice meant refusing all but required changes and requests. Thus, the results of my first task bombed immediately and my improvements were never implemented.
Eventually leadership clued into the fact that the content team was leaderless and made a personnel change, but it was far too little coming way too late for me and others. In the several months around my departure, the marketing team shed at least a dozen people and lost nearly 20 during and just after my tenure. Generally speaking, when one person on a large team quits, the reason up can be chalked up as personal. But when over a dozen leave in the span of months, it points to systemic team-wide problems.
In my estimation, Keypath has at least two:
First, the marketing team suffers from a perennial lack of leadership, the main upshot of which is that there is very little vertical communication. Marketing leadership controls strategy, but has more or less no idea what is happening on the ground tactically at any given time. When SEO informed the marketing leadership that operations would improve if the SEO team owned the content sourcing process, leadership had to ask if the content team was writing or buying blogs; talk about being out of touch. Conversely, those of us doing all the actual, tactical work had little or no say with regard to strategy. Personally, when I started, I was often asked for my strategic opinion. A few months later, that opinion started being ignored. Eventually, I was threatened with dismissal for voicing any opinion whatsoever; I adapted by either not giving feedback or making broad, positive blanket statements of little or no substance. My boss, with whom I had and still have a very strongly positive professional rapport, told me he sympathized with me, but still felt I should never be penalized for sharing my opinion. By the end of my time with Keypath, the writing was on the wall, not only was my opinion not valued, but having any opinion whatsoever in contradiction to anything was not allowed and would not be tolerated.
Second, the company on the whole suffers from the same problem: leadership is completely out of touch with the day-to-day goings on. The main upshot of this is that dissent of any kind is not tolerated and personnel are often summarily dismissed for actions as innocuous as voicing an original opinion. You can think of Keypath as a high school run by a clique who only wants to know what’s going on with those they consider cool. Everyone from director-level and up is more or less considered “in” and everyone else is not; without giving specifics, this characterization informs all internal processes, without exception. For me, because my position was just below that of a director, it meant my opinion was irrelevant and I was treated as wholly expendable, whereas directors with whom I worked, but who had no functional knowledge of my area of expertise, SEO, were more or less given carte blanche, even if this meant not making critical decisions. Coworkers with whom I’ve kept in contact have likewise told me they largely felt the same way. Imagine paying someone $60k, $70k, or $80k a year only to effectively tell them, “shut up and keep working.”
