Once-in-a-lifetime culture deteriorating as priorities shift to center growth and investors
Pros
At the time of my departure, the colleagues I worked with were incredibly talented, compassionate, supportive, creative, and genuinely wonderful humans to be around and to work with, and I'm grateful for having crossed paths with them. The company is in an aggressive growth phase and leadership emphasizes responsible growth and avoiding layoffs.
Cons
After two amazing years of employment, my third year was particularly challenging for my physical and mental wellbeing, resulting in the tough but necessary decision to leave what had been the best team I'd ever worked with (and likely ever will), as the environment that made it so great was eroding rapidly. The new CEO joined in January 2025, and was likely doing what he was tasked with doing by the venture capital firms backing the company: significantly accelerate the growth of the company, and maximize profits. And that's, fine. Many perfectly fine businesses do just that. Many SaaS companies use the same sort of playbook. It's just, in my opinion, not what made TeamDynamix such a great company to work for and with. Management, specifically of the professional services team, hasn't grown to match the demands of the size of the team, the complexity of the product, or the ever-increasing workload. There are inconsistent expectations about what managers are even expected to know and do, putting them in rather impossible positions where they aren't equipped with the skills or time to help their team, and they aren't able to meet their ambiguous performance goals. Additionally, staffing was so tight that managers would ask employees and colleagues who were out for medical reasons how soon they could be back in the office, or would pressure them to attend meetings or complete work regardless of their recuperation needs. It seems unlikely these things will change, because professional services are not the point of high-growth SaaS companies, and the cost/revenue relationship is not strong enough. An extension of the management and staffing issues, communication breakdowns that already existed were exacerbated. On more than one occasion, I'd be told that what we heard the CEO was asking wasn't at all what he said or meant, or that senior leadership was completely unaware of the management challenges the front-line staff were facing. Additionally, it seems there must have been pressure for managers to gain compliance and show results with the requests, and as a result, asking clarifying questions or raising concerns with any suggestion was (politely) framed as obstinance or obstructing change, and we were asked to refrain from negative feedback and just find ways to make the requests succeed. Nearer the end of my time, even big news was prefaced with the assertion that the changes were "all positive, no downsides" and there were no reasons for concern. These changes showed most in things like team meetings. Previously full of folks on camera, bantering and engaging discussion and debate around proposed changes, meetings grew quieter, with more and more people leaving their cameras off. In the last year, though the company worked hard to persuade us that their actions were still aligned with the stated values (visible on the company "about" page), there is not one value on the list that wasn't compromised, overlooked, or ignored multiple times, often at the same time we were told it was being upheld. It is *understandable* that businesses grow and change. It is *reasonable* that to do so they need to shift their priorities. But the willingness to repeatedly tell us we were doing things aligned with our values, while actively contradicting that with actions, communications, and decisions was what led to my departure.
