- Storytelling is a core business strength, and a personal strength of both founders. Ensuring that the stories are fully true is not a priority.
- Textio of 2016-2018 had a very strong employer brand, which it has failed to live up to. The current low morale and bleeding of employees is the natural result.
- The product vision is fickle, and planning and go-to-market processes lack rigor. Textio stumbled on some early successes (2017 & earlier) based on their hype, but the more recent releases from 2018 onward have failed to achieve similar traction. Leadership continues to use ad-hoc structureless product planning rather than creating robust product roadmaps, clear go-to-market strategies, customer personas, etc. Product vision and roadmapping are woefully underdeveloped. A years-long lack of consistent, seasoned leadership in both the product and marketing groups has compounded this problem.
- The company leadership is inexperienced and immature. This leads to all kinds of problems (details below).
Engineering leadership lacks startup experience outside of Textio. This has resulted in ineffective planning at any scale in between "here's what we're doing this week" and "here is a 2-year vision document with no concrete commitments or timelines." It means Textio has re-invented their own versions of standard engineering practices (example: their squad-based project development which rests on a typical matrixed organization, but lacks sprints or any other structured way of agreeing on timelines/deadlines, and has no clear mechanism for matching engineers to work). Engineering also has a culture that treats even hints of disagreement as an affront to the hierarchy of management.
Decisions made around HR and compensation continually undermine trust. Promises are made, then broken (example: in the wake of #BLM 2020 Textio promised to achieve pay transparency, but later diluted this promise down to the creation of standardized pay ranges for each role). Important deadlines are changed (example: annual compensation updates, always done in December, were pushed by several months into 2021). Policies disappear and/or are selectively applied (example: rules governing the proportion of people from under-represented groups within candidate pools).
There is a career ladder to govern employee growth and promotions, but it's also possible to be promoted or moved laterally into roles not represented in the ladder (surprise!). Without a record of what the criteria for those promotions are, how can anyone have confidence that the criteria are equitably applied?
