Whoop has a lot of the cliches common in a high-growth, “cool” startup (think CEO with a bit of a messiah complex, somewhat of a “drink-the-Kool-Aid” culture, and a lot of inexperience in key leadership/management positions). But to the extent that employees are annoyed by this, they’re willing to put up with it because of the incredible potential in the product, how interesting the health-tech space is, good pay, and the chance to work with super talented peers.
But while Whoop hires incredibly well, things get iffy when it comes to some of its homegrown talent. Not because they aren’t talented themselves, but because they’ve risen with the company and are now in positions for which they lack requisite experience, and though they mean well, they’re uninterested in changing their process, disseminating ownership or even recognizing/learning from mistakes.
Instead, they keep trying to hit copy/paste on what made them successful as an early stage startup despite the fact that it no longer works when there's closer to 1000 employees rather than 50. In this way, Whoop seems very much a victim of its own success.
This is probably most painfully felt in the product department (app side, not hardware) as the entire process is warped by the pull of the CEO and a few key stakeholders. Almost every project (and every iteration of every project) needs to be debated by each of these stakeholders in turn and things only proceed with final okay’s and generous pixel pushing from the CEO himself. As you might imagine, this leads to a slow and incredibly inefficient process.
This “bespoke” process might have been productive when Whoop was small but it falls apart at scale and it stifles the talent and knowledge of those hired to actually do the work. It also perpetuates leadership’s biases and blindspots, especially in a culture where “research” is a dirty word.
Therefore, though you’ll be told that at Whoop things “move at an uncomfortable pace”, expect even simple projects to take months, bogged down with endless rounds of feedback/revisions, changes of opinion, and technical issues because developers are kept in the dark till the last moment.
Though you’ll be told that all this feedback and clash of opinions lead to a better product, it’ll be clear that actual customer needs have long been forgotten (or were never defined in the first place) and that the resulting features are overly complex because they’re the compromise of 4 opinions (of the people farthest from the actual customers).
Though you’ll be told working here is an amazing growth opportunity, you might actually find your abilities as a PM or designer atrophying as you have to re-define success as opinion-based, learn to ignore research findings when it goes against “gut” (i.e. stakeholder opinion), and favor flashiness over function.
Granted a lot of the above isn’t unique to Whoop. You’ll find similar struggles at a lot of successful startups, just in different flavors. But what you might find most frustrating is leadership's refusal to change how work gets done. Even modest efforts to introduce industry best practices fall on deaf ears. Despite the obvious inefficiencies, leadership doubles down on its own formula, and its gives out laughable justifications such as “at Whoop we work differently” and “Will [the CEO] is always right” (I kid you not).
If you’re passionate about the health-tech space and looking to get a start in it, then working in product for Whoop might be worth it. But just know you will likely bear the responsibility but not have the means to do what you were ostensibly hired to do.
I don't regret my own choice to work there, but now on the other side I can safely say it’s the kind of company I really hope to avoid in the future.
