Confused identity
The term "startup in a grown-up" used to be thrown around (hint - no longer in use). What it essentially meant was, the chaos of a start-up's flat structure AND the bureaucracy of the corporate's hierarchy (more details below). People have been wondering about and outright raising the point that this was not how an org should operate. Like how a galatic star came to its death, management's solution was to add more managers and layers, bloating up even more.
Corporate cancer
Management level behaved exactly like corporate middle managers should - politicking to manage up, pushing responsibilities further down the chain and utterly unable to convince direct/indirect reports with reason. Instead, they weaponised KPI, group pressure and Chinese whispers to sow uncertainty and manipulate things to go their way. Here, the sole selling point is all ex-corporates and ex-consultants occupying management spots in accordance with Peter principle. Do not be deluded of the startup mode talks (most people never worked for any), just a very badly run corporate arm under the pretense of entrepreneurship.
Talent
You cannot misplace people any better than here, it is wrong people in wrong place scenario in every areas. Root cause is the dangerous thinking that if you participated in something from the sidelines in the past, you could just bluff your way into the next job (here). Easy enough when the ones making the decision are not qualified as well, safety in numbers since they cannot call each other out or else the whole shebang gets exposed. People who actually build stuff aren't trusted and supported, just treated the same way as vendors. Add nepotism and insecurity and you get the most frustrating environment for people used to moving fast in startups, no matter the kind of work because nothings get decided and no problems ever get solved. The only area that stands out is office management, not solution not product not engineering and design, Ops solve more problems than the bunch of overpaid people in day-long meetings. These people don't solve problems at root, they could only throw more numbers and hire more vendors to meet the deadline. Guess what? It makes things worse - deadlines are still missed, morales are rock-bottom. Management is too afraid to say no against their boss. Way easier to be yes-men/women and push whatever orders down, if it explodes in everyone's face do a retrospective and claim to "do better". This is wrong and disrespectful to the ones who suffered and actually did the work, because of managerial incompetence. To succeed, you just need to either "appear" talented or subservient and be ready to say yes to everything.
Product, direction and outlook
See the title? Nilch and zip, in bold. The people in charge know nothing about building a product, nothing about cracking the problems let alone managing and growing the team to cope with increasing pressure from lack of results and ever-burning expenses. The product/solution factory approach starts by having as many ideas as possible, then try to validate as many as possible and lastly, picking out the ones that make sense and develop them further. Sounds like a great plan? For sure, except for the fact that there are so few people that could actually plan and execute, but twice more for documentation, presentations and meetings. So obviously people went nuts on ideation (what happened to the plain English 'think of ideas' and the rest of non-Agile terms?). Since started, the group came up with so many ideas and shipped so little (mostly delayed or late stuff anyway, and stuff to show instead of stuff that people actually want). All because the big boss wanted 100 things and the people below couldn't manage to distill down a single thing, instead they actually planned for all of these without saying no. On top of it all, some could not stop parroting all the random examples of this unicorn startup's super app or that big company's ecosystem as if enough mentions would turn delusions into reality. Crucial difference - the successful ones have direction, focus, at least a great product (or 10), a patchy to working business model (that draws revenue) and people who believed in the products.
