Aily Labs

The people in the teams are nice and good to work with.

The product has some nice challenges, both technically and product-wise.

There's a good work-from-home balance and flexibility.

It's an international culture with offices all around Europe.

Company workshops happen 4 times a year (Oktoberfest, Ibiza in summer…) if you like these things.

The AI department is the core of the company and works efficiently and independently.

• Really poor work culture based on micromanagement.
• Cult to the leadership (especially the CEO) culture enforced during company workshops.
• Leadership (CEO and CTO) bypasses PMs, engineering managers, and teams, defining and estimating low-level tasks on a weekly basis.
• Leadership breaks in during company sprint reviews and demos to harass people, stop presentations to change the topic, change priorities, and redefine company goals with grandiloquent words that are far from reality and their management.
• Middle management is good, but they are not brave or experienced enough to stop leadership.
• The product is not a SaaS.
• Double technical debt: the product has two versions with two different architectures and tech stacks, both in production for clients. Neither is future-proof, as they have a lot of operational cost when growing in features and clients. This is a nice mid/long-term project of convergence that leadership is unable to execute correspondingly (they unilaterally estimated it in 100 days by the rule of thumb without anyone, not even management, knowing before presenting it).

• If you want people to last more than six months, please trust them and let them do the work how they think is best. That's why you hire smart people.

• Start treating them as people.

• Hire someone that can do the job in a professional way as C-levels (for the ones in place—CEO, COO, and CTO—and the ones missing).

• Allow middle management to do their job.

• Define the product. You can’t have a long-term product that changes at any level on a client basis; it needs to be defined at some level.

• Define a Professional Services structure instead of breaking the balance in the product teams to handle client requests and developments.