The company is tortured in growing pains, dysfunction, and toxicity. First-time CMO, Alan Marks, struggles to unify the marketing org. He continues to make constant reorgs and direction changes and brings in new leadership to “fix” the problems. I witnessed lots of good people just unexpectedly get fired, making everyone nervous and living in fear they are next. Groups are working in silos and struggle to do any meaningful work due to bureaucracy and role duplication. The work quality bar is low, favoring speed. That is because everyone spends all the time in meetings and dealing with politics and not working. The company lacks basic processes that you would expect at a company this size (there is seriously no standardized hiring process). There is lots of hype around ServiceNow being a top company, but I have found the culture to be extremely political and toxic. Senior leadership operates in the command and conquer model with very little empowerment to its people.
I also witnessed lots of people leave other top companies to join ServiceNow only to be crushed and deflated within the first few months. Senior leadership sugar coats the problems by describing it as a “hyper-growth” company because the problems are cemented into the company culture.
