A Typical Business Case of How to Ruin a Company in a Few Months
Pros
Decent salaries, good benefits, flexible working hours. A lot of smart dedicated people, especially within the low ranks.
Cons
This review is written with a good dose of objectivity. Note that one week after I joined the company, I have been asked to leave a positive review by HR. I refused to do so because it is unethical. Warning to folks reading the reviews, you can tell that many of the positive reviews are either written by HR or by new employees fresh out of onboarding week. I initially joined Turn because of the great image, caliber of people and amazing culture that they had. Unfortunately, the company is going through a very difficult phase which will result in its demise. I am certain that Turn will no longer be a major player in the industry for the following reasons: - There is simply no strategy. The upper management with the exception of a couple of folks has no idea how to read the market trends, listen to the employees, listen to customers and then build a roadmap. - Misalignment and backstabbing within the senior management team. This is literally a soap opera situation! I have never thought that in my lifetime I would witness such backstabbing, hatred and politics within a small organization. The level of obnoxious behavior within leaders makes Washington politics look so docile. - Operations and execution: Back in business school days, they taught us that the most difficult phase in a startup life is scaling it from 100 employees to 300. This is where Turn has failed. The management has no concept of operational excellence. - Innovation: How can you survive in ad tech without innovation. The level of throughput by product dev is dismal. Many other reviewers are right in stating that leaders within Product and Engineering are quite poor and no one is holding them accountable for their results. - Ethics: This is a big one. Ad Tech is a very fluid environment and crap happens everywhere. But at Turn it is at a different level. There are specific cases where I believe that the company mislead its customers and its employees. Sooner or later there will be a backlash and when customers will know that they can take their business elsewhere they won't hesitate to do it. - Reading the ecosystem: the company is reactive and it keeps changing its strategy from one month to the other. Read the industry news about Turn and you will notice how they announce something different each month. - Bottoms-up feedback: This is not a very communicative organization. Many of Turn's competitors offer a much more transparent and communication channels with the CEO or the upper management. Turn acts as if these channels are in place but actually they don't know how to operationalize them. For instance, one of the Turn rep responded to a reviewer by saying you can email the CEO directly. Sure! in an ideal environment. But when you know that the CEO will fire you or that your manager will make your life hard because you provided an honest feedback then no one will email that CEO!! There is not genuine policy to make all levels of the org participate in the decision-making. - Obsession with the IPO or being bought. Many companies in Ad Tech look for the IPO as a key to they success and fruition of the years of work they've done. At Turn it is simply the CEO and Manager's obsession. This only shows the lack of leadership and the spirit of a group of pseudo-managers that are just in it for the short term.