I believe Patchwork suffers from a culture of dishonesty. In my opinion, senior leaders say things like "Honesty is where we've been going wrong as a business" or joke about pulling the wool over customers' eyes during demos. It seems like roadmaps disappear and vital information becomes a tangled mess of conflicting stories, which completely shatters trust among teams.
It seems like Patchwork loves to cosplay as a modern, flexible company dedicated to tech for good. However, the majority of their customers are traditional enterprises expecting traditional waterfall processes. In my opinion, this leads to frequent clashes between teams that want to use Agile methodologies and trending product frameworks and customer expectations. The constant changes in frameworks and processes create chaos, with no clear evaluation of success metrics. Although Patchwork is technically a scale-up, senior leaders still seem to expect a level of dedication that is more suitable for early-stage start-ups. Be careful with your expectations here if you're not ready to go way above and beyond. Leaders seemingly expect employees to sacrifice personal boundaries (including childcare), work late hours, be available 24/7, and travel to hospitals across the UK at a moment's notice. Usually, that level of dedication is worth it if you feel like you're making an impact, but over here it feels like you're just another drain on the NHS.
Unsurprisingly the passionate and idealistic employees who were recruited under the impression that they'll be doing tech for good are seemingly ground down and burned out within a year, leading to a high churn rate.
Patchwork makes sense more as a consulting firm than a tech company. In my opinion, they prioritise building and maintaining customer relationships above all else, often neglecting the technical aspects of their product.
If you're considering joining Patchwork, don't take my review or any other information at face value. Dig deeper and ask for concrete performance metrics like NPS and team-specific churn rates. Make sure the actual responsibilities of the role align with the job description, as mismatched job expectations were apparently the main reason people cited for leaving while I was there. If you accept an offer, be careful that those expectations don't change during your probation period. I realised too late that my interviewers apparently misled me about my role, the team I would be joining, the health of the product, and the state of the company. Don't be like me.