Good industry experience but toxic work environment - Account Manager Jampp Employee Review

Hi, I'm Diego Meller, a co-founder of Jampp and its CEO. Thank you for taking the time to share such a detailed account of your time at Jampp. We value all of our current and former employee’s feedback. As CEO, I am deeply saddened that anyone working here could perceive their experience at Jampp as such a negative one. It is true that, if you were an Account Manager, there was a period towards the end of 2018 and mid 2019 in which that team went through a few changes in leadership (which improved customer retention, revenue growth and also recruiting offers accepted). Some may have perceived this as chaotic but most saw it as much needed change. We are a startup in a fast paced environment and sometimes change is not as smooth as we would like it to be. I would like to address specifically some of the things you bring up for clarification, as a lot of those we perceive differently: ***“No Flexibility: They don't allow employees to work from home in the HQ office, but in other offices there is no issue with this”*** Until recently we didn’t have a “work from home” policy but we allowed people to do so on a case by case basis. As time went by we realized this was important to the team and in September 2019 we announced our new Work From Home and Remote Work policy in which Jamppers can choose a given amount of days every month (depending on how long they’ve been with the company) to work from home or some other location. The new policy (as well as the old practice) is the same for all Jampp offices, which brings me to your point that there is... *** “a huge disconnect in how the employees are treated in the HQ office and how the small Sales staff is treated in San Francisco”*** Employees in San Francisco (who by the way work out of a WeWork as opposed to our own office in Buenos Aires) have to respect the same policies as in HQ. I’m actually based in San Francisco myself and make sure this is the case. In general, the San Francisco staff is mostly sales and hence spends more time out of the office in meetings and travelling. ***“Forced and fake culture” “It can be incredibly disheartening as an employee to see 3-4 people leave the company per month when there are only ~80 employees globally.” *** This is probably the most hurtful of all the comments because since day 1 (when we didn’t even have a business yet) we have paid close attention to Jampp’s culture and how we behave as Jamppers. We are now close to 100 Jamppers globally and our average historic employee tenure at Jampp is close to 3 years. Also, I would argue Jampp’s culture is the best thing we have, we have repeatedly received praise by fellow startups and former employees who try to replicate what Jampp has in their new companies. I invite anyone to check out our blog posts and videos (or visit our offices to meet our team) and to ask former or current Jampp employees to see/hear for themselves. ***“There are many issues with Jampp's product and they still have a lot of bugs to fix. Account managers spend most of their time dealing with angry customers and are unable to focus on growing and scaling the business.”*** As any technology startup, our product and new feature releases are never perfect out of the gate, there will always be “bugs” and we will always be critical of what we do. One of our values is “don't rest on our laurels" because as a technology company we will always keep improving our product, we are never happy with its current state. We do weekly bug fix releases and larger product improvements/releases every 3 months (last one was a complete revamp of our campaign management tools), and the last two quarters we released features such as Always on Lift Measurement. Our customer churn is in line with the rest of the industry and some of our larger customers have been working with Jampp for over 4 years. ***“No clear direction or strategy: Jampp also lacks a clear strategy on how to grow the company. *** It seems to me you somehow didn’t fully comprehend our strategy and it’s good feedback to improve the way we share this with the team. We’ve been having all-hand meetings quarterly (we broadcast them live to all offices) almost since the beginning. In these meetings, we review the quarter and yearly objectives as well as share (in detail) our strategy. We actually record these and make them available for all Jamppers to see at any time, and send a follow up email with our strategy as well as quarterly OKRs (which are also done on a team-level by each team) to make sure everyone can feel aligned. As with everything, we are always looking for ways to improve how we do this. ***"The tech team is grossly understaffed, which means that any technical issues that arise will take the entire team offline for some time. Jampp seems to focus most of their effort, resources, and investment on the Sales team rather than working on building a robust product that can consistently deliver results.”*** Currently, and this number hasn’t changed since we started, +40% of our team is in Technology and Product as opposed to only 7% in Sales. Having said that, we would love to hire a lot more talent in our tech team (not sure if there’s any tech startup in the world that is “overstaffed” on tech talent). We are currently looking for (more) passionate software engineers to help us tackle the challenge of building our platform, which (among many other things) processes 1 million requests per second and is able to respond to ad inventory auctions in less than 8 ms. Thank you again for your feedback and good luck.