Medallia reviews

Like any company growing super fast, there is a lot of work to do, and priorities often shift, so sometimes it can be tough to stay focused and know what really matters.

For context, I was on the product team. Given the mission, it's ironic how little Medallia leadership seems to care about it's employees or it's customers. This is the first company in my 15+ year career, that I actively discourage others from considering. They talk a great game, about culture... about caring about their people, but numerous occasions suggest otherwise. For one re-org, a well-respected senior manager found out he was being let go... from his reports. Another very senior leader was simply replaced by a much less accomplished and respected yes-man. In this case, I know first hand that there had not been any performance issues. Needless to say, a mass exodus followed. For many ICs, countless hours and ridiculous workloads go completely unacknowledged by the CEO, who wishes he was a "product guy" so he should presumably be close enough to recognize these efforts. Of course they (he) also talks a great game, about product... but it's a joke. First, the tech debt is astonishing. Seriously, unbelievable. As in you won't believe it until you make a ridiculously reasonable request and get a multi-sprint estimate from eng. Secondly, and perhaps most frustratingly, the entire strategy is rooted in a "please the whale" client service mindset. They struggle to hire any PMs with a true background in actually shipping product. There just is no long term scalable product vision. And finally, for a company with a mission about being loved by customers, they talk a great game about loving their customers, but the insulting state of their user experience is SHOCKINGLY bad. We're talking buttons that require a checkbox with labels like "don't push this unless you know what you're doing". Tacit tribal knowledge is also par for the course, so trying to learn the system is a hard won badge of honor which the original engineers use as gateway for engaging in any meaningful questioning of what has been built. In my opinion, they hide behind a refrain of "honor the complexity" so as to not have to tackle real underlying neglected object models. If I could take back the two years I spent there, I would. In hindsight, it was a career mistake. My biggest learnings were about how to better vet a great "sounding" tech company going forward. And that's a good lesson. My advice to anyone already there: don't sit it out worried that it's you not "getting it" or not appropriately "honoring the complexity"; it's not you – it's a bad environment with crappy tech and no real product strategy. Get out.