Medallia reviews

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.

My review echoes many of the reviews already posted. The takeaway is that the problems at Medallia are very real and aren't isolated to a handful of people. I like a lot of my colleagues but I regret joining Medallia in retrospect. My professional development has been stifled by the repetitive nature of the work and I've had a lot of trouble finding a mentor here since there are very few people here who know what it means to be a mentor and mentorship isn't prioritized here. I'm in Implementations and have seen things continue to decline since I started here. Things haven't been getting better. They just keep getting worse. I don't enjoy the work I do and I'm badly overworked. The work is repetitive, unsatisfying, and almost always thankless. Many of us feel like we're being taken advantage of. We regularly do work that's beyond the scope of our roles because that's what's expected of us, and this is fine. But once we ask for compensation or a title that matches the work we're doing we're met with a response I can only describe as "how dare you," and this is not fine. I get that this is a company where we need to roll up our sleeves and do what's needed but at least recognize the effort and change in scope via comp and title instead of taking advantage of us so much and for so long. This is killing morale. The product is also really unreliable and breaks down on you in the most random ways with way too much regularity. It's hard to know if it's doing what it should be doing at any given moment. Another reviewer commented that you don't pick up any technical skills that translate outside of Medallia and I agree with that. There's no career path and I don't see any reason for me to keep pushing myself to deliver high quality work when I know that won't lead to a promotion. Promotions here are more politically driven than merit based and I'm unlucky enough to have a manager who isn't concerned with the career path of any of his direct reports. My colleagues and I have tried talking to my manager, our skip level, and HRBPs and all we get are delay tactics and more talking with no resolution. Even if the resolution isn't in my favor I'd rather have that then have these conversations go on endlessly and fizzle out. I'm at a point where I feel like I have nowhere to go if I need help and I don't believe anyone in leadership has what it takes to actually help those of us under them. I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. My manager was recently promoted and he definitely didn't deserve it because of merit or because he's a good people manager. In fact most of us on his team want to get out from under him but are concerned about him retaliating in the unlikely event that we're up for promotion. Since our current head of Implementations came on board, my manager has spent every waking moment at his boss's side, campaigning for himself while showing zero concern or empathy for his own direct reports and to treat us like we're bothering him when we need help. I've considered switching to another team in Implementations but the sad truth I've learned from talking to my colleagues across Implementations is there really are only a handful of people managers here who know how to manage people. I agree with other reviewers who say that the tone of Implementations and Medallia in general now revolves around finger pointing, pettiness, unprofessionalism, self promotion, and attention seeking behaviors and that's very clearly lived out by our people managers and I think it originates from the top of Implementations because things weren't like this before. We struggled with the quality of people management before but not on this scale. I don't have much hope for Medallia actually fixing these issues or making any real improvements and after seeing things consistently decline since starting here, I'm now looking to leave. There's a lot of potential for Medallia to be a great place to work but we really need leadership to step up their game and allow themselves to get uncomfortable to make this happen. What's really annoying is to keep hearing the same "we're aware that there are some leadership or people management issues and we're working to improve things." But what credence can we give this when we have bad leaders trying to figure out how to deal with or fix other bad leaders? It's the blind leading the blind. We're hearing alot of "we're investing in leadership" but when are we going to realize that not all leaders can be developed into effective leaders and may need to go? On top of hearing the usual "we're working to improve things" we also hear alot of "we're experiencing growing pains that come with rapid growth" and I'm tired of leadership hiding behind these excuses and not actually effecting any change. If you keep saying you're working on something is that an excuse to not provide a solution? I've been hearing these lines since day one and they're tired and overused cop outs. We keep hearing "we're working on it" or "we're going to implement something to fix this," but like I said things haven't gotten better and have gotten worse over time and we haven't seen any real solutions. An example of this is the text analytics team. It's well known throughout Professional Services that they have severe leadership issues. How many more people on that team need to quit before Medallia opens it eyes and does something? We've lost so many members from that team already. Do we count on a cycle of unhappy employees leaving and then replacing them with new hires and rinse and repeat, absolving us from having to address the underlying issues? Trusting leadership is another issue. Many of us feel that they are constantly trying to pull one over on us. Their actions with the switch to open vacation and with the initial rollout of the recent employee survey send a concerning message. The ethics are questionable and these actions demonstrate more self preservation than actually having the best interest of Medallia employees at heart. The vacation and employee survey issues were corrected because of the mass backlash leadership received for it. That leadership even tries to pull these unethical stunts with us in the first place doesn't send a comforting message. We're just waiting to see what stunt they'll try to pull next. I don't expect anything to come of this review except for it to be followed by a suspicioulsly generic but positive review stating that the product is great and the quality of leadership is either great or improving with no real or meaningful criticism other than something general about growing pains. Yet another example of how Medallia's leadership is more concerned about giving the illusion that things are great but not actually doing anything to really make things great, which is a great message to send for a company that allegedly focuses on feedback btw. Again ethics ftw and a huge failure for living out the company mission. If only leadership would really pay attention to what's going on and do something about it, then maybe they wouldn't see so many complaints they have to superficially control for on the outside.