Comfortable, yet incompetent kindergarten - Manager Piktochart Employee Review

Long story short: For anyone who cares about their personal growth and career development Piktochart is the worst place to be. There’s dozens of employees who work in the company for many years who haven’t developed skills beyond what would be considered junior in most other companies. Piktochart doesn’t understand how growth works — both, in terms of people and business. The leaders have hardly any knowledge or experience how to build a product or run a company. Piktochart’s business success (and now dwindling cash resources) came from luck of being at the right place at the right time in a then strongly growing market segment. However, Piktochart proves incapable of navigating a changing environment around them. It’s a sinking ship with a naive culture that’s resistant to the drastic changes and hard decisions successful businesses have to make regularly. In detail: Lack of career opportunities: It’s a small company, so naturally there are limited career opportunities within. Promotions are delayed for employees who skilled up and are deserving a more senior title (and pay). Lack of growth: The team is quite inexperienced, even most of the ‘senior’ employees and managers. This overall low experience level makes it very challenging to develop skills from within eg. by observing and learning from senior colleagues. Every employee has a budget for personal development, however it’s so tiny that it can’t move the needle much. Personal connections over excellence: You’re mostly getting evaluated against how likeable you are. Achievements matter very little, quite the opposite: Exceptionally good people are often told to hold back their ideas, because it could intimidate others. At Pikto it’s less important how good your idea is, what matters more is how much support an idea has from everyone. Substance is secondary, connections and style are everything. Values are only lived when they’re convenient for the founders. One example of many: We had to significantly change the role of a long-term employee. She was not interested in the new requirements and we couldn’t find another suitable role, so unfortunately we had to let her go. However Piktochart didn’t pay her the redundancy amount she was legally entitled to for her many years of service. Pikto only offered half of that and pressured her into accepting, knowing full well and exploiting the introvert nature of the employee in question. Diversity is lacking: On the one hand Piktochart has great diversity in terms of gender and nationalities. However, there’s little diversity of opinion. The ‘culture fit’ of all employees is very important for the founder and strongly enforced. In practice, ‘culture fit’ means to be and behave as much like the founder as possible. For the founder unity and uniformity are sacred. Instead of creating a culture that embraces the benefits of intense debate, that can turn a broad set of perspectives and experiences into truly innovative ideas, she prefers a conflict-free journey which unfortunately only leads to mediocre outcomes. Intellectual diversity gets limited from the get-go when hiring and firing. Pikto doesn’t want the smartest people in their team. Equality is prime, being ‘outstanding’ doesn’t fit in with this. Pikto’s misguided equality-cult goes so far that I actually got criticised for praising coworkers who do a great job — because I did not complement everyone equally (including the ones who didn’t perform well). The environment is childish — from the way you’re forced to express yourself, to Zoom-team-events playing games you would with your little children. It feels like being in a kindergarten, instead of among adults trying to build something amazing together. The team ‘doesn’t care’: In an engaged organisation employees would be excited about the product and their market. Employees would come together by themselves bouncing ideas, discussing trends, etc. Not so at Pikto. Ideas don’t happen, innovation is expected top down. Many have given up and just do what they’re told to do. Lack of direction: Pikto is surely not a mission/vision driven company, which is reflected in how often those are changing and hardly any employee being able to state them. — If you don’t even know what you’re trying to achieve together, how can that possibly lead to sustained success? The CEO doesn’t understand her role: She’s only interested in the culture aspect of the organisation. The result is a neglected product, lack of a coherent strategy (Pikto has a little bit of ‘strategy’, that randomly changes around every quarter) and even lack of investing in the growth of the team. She only ’trusts’ her team if she happens to believe the same thing. If her personal experience or opinion differs, no matter how solid the evidence against it, she will often decide her way against the experts she hired. She has to experience everything herself before willing to commit to anything, neglecting that customers might think differently. Her decision making can be erratic, often heavily influenced by the last thing she read or the last person she talked to. Usually one says the experience gained working one year at a startup equals many years in a traditional company. At Piktochart it’s quite the opposite. Piktochart is not a startup, at best it’s a badly run, inexperienced, small business just muddling through. Therefore for most, a year spent at Pikto is more of a long holiday than career progress. (One colleague literally told me they were exhausted from previous jobs and enjoyed the easy life at Pikto, but would leave after a short while to find challenging work again — and they did.)