People :
1) The program management team that deals with technical integrations neither understands not wants to learn some of the technical concepts. That often results in miscommunication. The PM is then expected to clear the air which happens quite frequently.
2) The service and drp teams have poor culture and pathetic leadership. Thats why almost 40% of the team left within 0 - 18 months of their employment.
3) There is no product leadership. They hired one guy and fired him because he was trying to change bad habits within the organisation.
4) The product managers here are not well groomed. Most of them who joined in the early phase were recent graduates. Therefore if you are an experienced pm, you might have to unlearn a lot of good habits to accommodate the culture.
5) Any random person in the organisation can reach out to the pm and hold them accountable for their request. Therefore, one looses a lot of time in talking to people who you know nothing about.
6) Since its a company of yes man culture, a lot of people have a problem with folks who ask questions. If you look at the feedback they provide to almost everyone in the team, its mainly around how many people do not like you and what can you do to make them like you. I have not seen objective okr's and metrics on which people are evaluated in my tenure.
7) There is one peculiar problem here which I am not sure why it exists but it does. There are some engineering teams who do not talk to each other. It was my job and my teams job to organise engineering catchups where these team talk to each other and close the engineering solution. Therefore, as product managers, it was our job to baby sit these adults, resolve their disputes and communicate to all leadership about progress during these standoffs. The catch here is that this happens once you have handed off all your items to engineering teams and they have accepted the work and started development on it.
Processes :
1) This company has absolutely 0 processes. They create a processes on the fly every week.
2) I have seen absolutely no objective way of prioritising items to be picked up on both tactical and strategic level. The employees are expected to run with 10s of projects and if anything is lagging behind, then the management does the the reprioritisation.
3) There is no clear ownership defined for the role, hence a product manager is expected to escalate about their own team for slightest of delays which results in a toxic culture and zero trust.
4) Their use archaic processes typically used in services company with many to many mapping of product managers to a developers. Therefore, its very hard to own a product end to end here. There is no concept of pod in Tekion.
5) The developers don't test their code and expect QAs to do all the work. Hence, most of the times, PMs are dealing with production issues. The management doesn't even look at the amount of time spent on production issues vs feature development. If you ask the engineering leadership, they wouldn't know the amount of story points they plan to deliver in current sprint.
6) There is no process of raising and resolving bugs.
Product / Management :
1) Product management is a tertiary function in this organisation. It is preceded by sales, operations and engineering.
2) Most of the PM have never met the actual customer. They never know who they are building for and there is absolutely no way of learning by observing the customer while they are using your product. Almost all the problems solved are reactive in nature.