Rivian

Great brand. Overall, great first products that are just ramping, and customers love them. There's real upside opportunity if the company can pull through the next few years.

There is no shared culture at the company. Departments and teams work in radically different styles and struggle to collaborate as a result.

Cross-functional teams will ignore messages, emails, and meetings. They will finally get in touch and commit to something, then fail to follow through. There is no accountability between teams, and it's often lacking within them.

Politics and territory battles are brutal, and they are the only way things get done. Major projects are allowed to fail or are even sabotaged between teams. No one trusts anyone outside of their immediate team. Entire teams will idle while politics play out.

There are multiple layers of poor middle management. Many of these managers don't know how to lead teams or drive major projects. The company is missing leaders in key areas who are willing to make major decisions and rally teams around them. This has led to competing and overlapping projects everywhere, feeding politics and inefficiencies, and leaving stakeholders with multiple half-solutions.

There are many pockets of downright strange org structure. Managers managing managers, ICs, and dozens of contractors on one team. Teams are in strange departments due to politics. There are redundant teams across departments or even within the same department. Title inflation is everywhere. Numerous lead, senior, staff, and principal engineers exist, few deserving of it. Many have to be worked around.

• Deep cuts and major reorganizations are needed not to control costs, but to reset culture. If the changes are too shallow, you may control costs but will fail to set the culture needed for the next phase of growth.

• Increase focus and ownership at all levels of the company. Committees can't replace leadership or solve every problem at once. Prioritize ruthlessly and give leaders ownership over a problem along with the resources to solve it. If they fail, remove them quickly.