Toxic, incompetent, and dishonest. Run away! - Senior Product Manager RedShelf Employee Review

1.0
16 Jan 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

RedShelf is a master class in how not to run a business; spending even a week here will be far more worthwhile than a year spent studying HBR case studies on bad management decisions, leadership failures, sunk-cost fallacies, and toxic work environments. Unfortunately, the price of getting that education is experiencing breathtaking dysfunction on a personal, first-hand basis.

Cons

1. Leadership: With nearly 100% executive leadership turnover in a year, you know you're in for a wild ride. It's a veritable race to the bottom at RedShelf, with unrealistic goals, a complete lack of departmental alignment, and a blame culture that borders on cartoonish. 2. Priorities: RedShelf has been a struggling business since it's inception, which management clearly thinks can be addressed by changing company priorities and strategic direction every 6 months. If you're the kind of person who thinks "why do one thing well when you can do 5 things poorly?", you'll fit in at RedShelf. Management mistakes jingoism with progress, using dystopian "productivity phrases" rather than investing in actual sound strategy. 3. Tech stack: RedShelf's tech stack is as dilapidated and disgusting as the 3-year old keg of green beer that they have in the office (no joke) - it's a small wonder they can support one customer (all with backend scripts and hacky workarounds), and any possibility of scaling is completely unrealistic. 4. Business processes: honestly, it's incredible to see how much they have done with Google Sheets and copy/paste functionality. If your idea of running a business is informed by a 6th grade math project where you and your teammates collaborated in a Google Sheet, you'll fit right in here.

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RedShelf Response
2y
Thank you for providing a review on your experience at RedShelf. We sincerely apologize that you believed this to be your experience and hope you've since found a new home that is both challenging and rewarding. You have tremendous industry knowledge and strong product experience. There is no doubt that wherever you've landed, your new organization is lucky to have you. We'd like to give you a bit of an update on what's been happening at RedShelf since last Fall based on your feedback. We hope that it'll leave you with a bit of confidence that RedShelf continues to progress forward and has been seeing many successes within the areas for which you helped lay the foundation. Since September, RedShelf has moved from our Office Space and is preparing for a move that is more suitable to our size and the demographics of our colleagues. We too were thrilled to finally be able to appropriately recycle our unused kegerators. Our technology and products - including our industry-leading Cascading Access program - are receiving tremendous feedback. This is, in part, thanks to your contribution. Your former colleagues and our automated platform achieved a record high CSAT in Fall 2023 and we are building on that this Spring. We sincerely hope that one day when you reflect back on your contributions at RedShelf you will be proud of the products you helped build and deliver to the market. We are grateful for the time you spent with us and the impact you had on our partners and our products.

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