Pros
- A great time to be in robotics, the products you work on are very tangible and you get to know it very well from the design, user interface, down to the packaging and wording in the manuals. It's also nice to be able to take home and use the products you worked on.
- Very friendly and low stress work environment, although iRobot has been in business over 20 years there are some projects that run like a start-up and when there is a deadline most people will do what it takes to deliver but for the most part realistic goals and deadlines are agreed upon and if properly planned ahead it doesn't get too stressful or chaotic.
- Good collaboration within various departments as it's not just engineering talent to get to a successful product launch but there is marketing, finance, legal/compliance, manufacturing, customer support, etc and it's very insightful to get a full view of what it takes to launch a product.
- Little employee perks from team building activities, team lunches, beer carts, half day Fridays in the Summer months, also a casual environment and some people bring their dogs to work on Fridays
- Overall great benefits package; salaries are on par with other tech companies in the area but again a great work life balance is sometimes more valuable than an extra $10~15k going to "greener" pastures. iRobot seems to be good pickings for talent as other companies and start-ups recruit from here.
Cons
A lot of effort in various sku releases and variants of the roomba for different markets and price points. Instead of expending head count and resources to differentiate various flavors of a robotic vacuum cleaner a better strategy is to deploy resources to expand into new product categories. If there is an economic downturn people will cut-back on unnecessary purchases like a robotic vacuum cleaner regardless if it's a cheaper 600 series or the latest 900 series. The Roomba is our flagship product and I think expanding into other product development would help drive growth and keep employees engaged through any downturn to start launching out new products. There are a few new projects but could get into other product lines like smart home devices, IoT, etc. There are also some other less known products that we could continue to improve and leverage the iRobot brand name to grow market share for the pool cleaning robot to the gutter cleaning robot. After all we want to be known as the robot company and not just a Roomba company.
