*Severe management issues that stem from the very top. While the CEO is very personable and makes the rounds to talk to the employees when he is in town, he doesn't really listen to their suggestions. Instead, he filters everything through his managers as though he doesn't trust himself in knowing good ideas from bad ones. Sorry, but responsibility and leadership are top-down corporate things. Ashish must take personal responsibility for the internal failings of his company before anything will get better.
*Company values are a sham. A great example of this is that they love to say they value candor, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The truth is that you had better get a feel for what department supervisors think -- and join the lock-step train behind them -- or you will be shown the door. My supervisor there had limited vision and was the very definition of a "brilliant jerk", something that Cricut professed to despise, but actually cultivated at the top.
An even deeper failing in the values area is that while they hire employees who are loyal to the company and give 110% of themselves, these employees soon find out that this is a one-way relationship. I saw several amazing employees who were recognized month-after-month for selfless service and great performance who later left the company on their own or were fired; and when I asked managers what happened I was told "they weren't Cricut material". What hypocrisy! They were great examples of being "Cricut material" for years while they poured themselves into their work, but when they clashed with management egos suddenly they were the problem. Even worse is that several of them received NO severance pay or other consideration upon being let go. There is NO job security with a company like this.
*Hasn't learned the lessons of their troubled past. While they lead their markets in a few products, their new product designs have many internal problems. Cricut rushes their products to launch without correcting flaws in the design phase. When problems surface later they are often "solved" by increasing the part complexity and moving to high tolerances. The result is that their machines are "an accident waiting to happen" on the manufacturing line and in stores. If the smallest thing goes out of tolerance it often affects multiple systems and results in line closures, missed shipments, and missed delivery deadlines. Worse is the fact that many machines just don't work well for the customer, and if they do there is no guarantee that this will last.
*Company benefits and incentives suck. While they have to pay well to get good people to work for them, Cricut's benefits are poor at best. Their health plans are very expensive for the meager benefits, and serve mostly as insurance against bankruptcy with their high deductibles. Profit sharing is non-existent for everyone except department managers and VPs.
*Customer focus is a lower priority than competitor focus. While Cricut likes to talk NPS, what really drives them is what their competition is doing. If they're leading in an area then they rest on their laurels. If they're behind then they finally scramble to come up with something to match their competition. This is sad because what should drive them is improving their product quality to come up to expectations in quality standards that their customers are eternally looking for but never actually receiving.
I sat through countless meetings where failings of the past were discussed by management as taking them to the brink of bankruptcy, but I couldn't help but see how much the same poor-quality issues and decisions of the past were still present. Perhaps this is due to Cricut's refusal to get new management in some key areas. They swapped out their CEO, but kept the engineering leader who was responsible for low-quality products that flopped with their earlier customers in the first place. Even worse is that the new CEO filters everything he does through this person, despite many years of complaints from managers in several other departments about this. What a miserable bottle-neck this has created! Cricut's customers deserve better quality, and it's employees deserve managers with a true customer focus so that the company will succeed and endure.