Smartsheet

The people are amazing to work with almost across the board. The project/product manages were some of the best I’ve ever worked with. While the batting average is 250 in most places the standard at Smartsheet is 500 in terms of performance, professional & personal collaboration and the desire for us all to succeed.

Solid product I was proud to own publicly with a strong focus on the customer. Customer impact was often discussed and always considered before new features, update or fixes were undertaken or deployed.

The company is holding onto some of the tools, organizational thinking, and backend priorities from its startup days in 2005. Pushing to adopt industry standard changes can be challenging.

An ongoing loss of quality people due to multiple re-orgs that were abrupt, poorly communicated, poorly executed without being fully thought through, created the need for additional re-orgs. These impacted the corporate culture and morale across the engineering organizations, but left the challenges mentioned above unchanged.

The corporate culture was unparalleled when I joined Smartsheet, and it was a rare occurrence that anyone left. So many long-term employees are leaving recently that you stopped sending out the weekly mail thanking those moving on. The vast majority are Smartsheeters that built the culture that has been seemingly abandoned.

The failure to establish even annual priority without unforeseen impacts from well-known long-standing infrastructure or tech debt is randomizing companywide. Focusing on the 'new shiny' and delaying, (again), the expensive underlying issues is shortsighted.