Everything is just so bloody difficult. And there isn’t a culture of honest feedback, learning and improvement at the highest level and in the business more widely. I had a chuckle at the management response to another Glassdoor review of Flo a few months back. A combination of concern on the surface, mild threat implicit in what was being said and a whole load of “the beatings will continue till morale improves” – pretty much sums up the management culture here.
Talking about the management team – decisions about the product are made mostly by three men. There’s just not enough senior women involved in decision making. There’s just not enough senior women full stop. (Can’t hire them? Can’t get them to stay? Its pretty concerning TBH)
I mean, things are getting better, but slowly and in patches and its quite exhausting. There’s a lot of talk about us being a new business and that’s why things are chaos and hard going but we’ve been around long enough for some of these basic issues to be fixed. I think the problem is resistance to change from the management team who have been here from the start and see no reason to change. A lot of the original and Belorussian team don’t get what the UK people are talking about when we discuss things like research. There’s definitely a culture gap. The biggest culture gap is between the uk product and creative and content teams and the rest of the organisation. A good example of this is how we see research and insight. The prevailing view with the original team is that research is post hoc confirmation of what we are doing, but a lot of us want the research to feed our work and help us give our customers something they can’t get on other apps or for free on their fitbit and apple watch. A lot of effort is spent on writing marketing copy to encourage people to pay, but a lot of us think we should give people something they want to pay for rather than spamming our users with ads and pop ups . The strategy seems to be to make the app so unpleasant to use that if you’ve not got premium you just give up and pay. Not sure how well that’s working out for us. I’ve been going to the app store and sorting our reviews by recent and I just…cringe. It’s embarrassing.
I’m pretty torn as I love my colleagues and my boss, and I see so much potential but so much of what is happening in the business and on the app is exhausting.
I’m still optimistic though, and I’ll stick around to see if the brilliant people I work with can make some changes, but maybe this is because I’ve already invested so much time, energy and emotion it will feel like that’s all gone to waste if I don’t stick around.
So – there you have it. Could be you’re up for a challenge and what I’ve said excites you and you’re keen to get involved. Or maybe my review makes it clear this is not the place for you. Either way I hope my review has given you enough information to make an informed choice on whether this is the right place for you.
