Under Armour reviews

Things may have changed since I left, but at that time there were 2 Data Science teams. One was the Map My Fitness team (map my run, map my ride… all that) and then the DS team located in IT. This review is for the IT team - the Map My Fitness team seemed better and were doing very interesting work, but I can’t speak for that part of the company other than that. The team was very disorganized and leadership was so focused on trying to get buy-in from skeptical business partners (honestly don’t blame them for their skepticism) that instead of trying to win them over with excellent work and collaboration, they took on an order taking stance. Whatever they want, just do it, and get it done fast. The quality of the work mattered less than making sure they were happy with the results, to the extent that there was pressure to make the numbers work, even if there was a lack of confidence that they were correct. Even though the team was in the IT org, they had virtually no technical support. This lead to risky data practices and no real plan for how they would support products beyond basic POC stages. Think lots of time doing manual runs whenever the biz wanted updated numbers, with the hope that whoever did the original run was a.) still around and b.) could remember what they did. Documentation was minimal, and code was not written with maintainability in mind. All this could be handled if team leadership understood why this was a problem and would back the work needed to fix it. It needs to be a major focus area, not just something a couple people work on in their spare time. Bottom line, if leadership doesn’t support a strong focus on fixing the basics, even if it's part of the work that biz partners don’t see, it will never happen. If leadership doesn’t understand it themselves, that support will never come. They also have a very long history of relying on contractors/consultants to come in and do advanced analytics and DS work. They get the shiny one-off results that tell the story they wanted, but often the delivery doesn't include the actual code for the solution because that is proprietary/wasn't included in the contract. Then they expect their limited FTE resources to find a way to re-create and maintain that work without any way to replicate how the original solution was obtained. On the business side itself, it’s very old school and slow. They have to do so much critical planning years in advance because of how long it takes to get from idea stage to things in the stores. This applies to things like pricing - something that you would think a big company like this would prioritize being able to respond fast to given how quickly markets can change. You often hear the "well, this is how it has always been" reasoning. I hope potential employees are doing a lot of research on the health of the company before jumping in.

I had so much expertise in my space and was very hopeful to really make an impact for the company. A short time in and I realized I was in an extremely toxic work environment, filled with sexism and bullying. Senior management and HR were useless. It became apparent that the role was not as advertised and it was a list of false promises. You have to really be careful with what you are getting yourself into — lots of due diligence is needed as once you get there it’s clear it’s not an “employees first” kind of place. Had I know, I would have never left my old job. As one senior executive leader said, this is not a place that’s easy if your a women, despite the DE&I efforts. Lots of hard work to do so they better start soul-searching.