Feb 14, 2019
Anonymous employee
Wonder Research Response
7yHi there,
It sounds like you had some bad experiences here and it’s painful to read that you’re left with negative feelings.
However painful, this feedback is really helpful for us and will propel us to be better, so thank you for sharing.
We work hard to foster transparency, even in sticky situations, so here goes:
- Since the creation of the exec team, 4 exec members have either been fired or quit. Reasons range from poor fits to mis-hires to life changes & cross-country moves. These departures aren’t easy - they affect a lot of people and require a lot of resources, so to mitigate in the future, we’ve significantly expanded our exec team interview process to ensure it’s the right fit for both parties before making the commitment.
- We’ve tried multiple different strategies to communicate departures across company (all-hands, emails, Slack messages etc.), each of which worked to varying degrees and come with its own set of pros and cons. After speaking with advisors and other startup exec teams, it’s clear this is a process startups often struggle with as they grow. We’ve navigated towards a comm strategy that ensures everyone necessary is informed, while being as transparent as legally possible, while maintaining employee focus and morale. It’s not perfect, so I’m sure we will keep tweaking it as we learn.
- Our product is definitely a work in progress. We’re an early stage startup working to make knowledge accessible at a massive scale and it will be a loooong journey to get there. Improving our product is something the entire company talks about regularly - from weekly company-wide updates, to brainstorms, to channels in slack dedicated to ideas and product feedback, to retros to learn what has worked and what hasn’t.
- It would be helpful to hear more about your experience so we can learn from it. Assuming you still have a number or email you can use, we would really appreciate if you’d reach out to us with more details.
- Wonder Team