How to know when to give up on your company

TLDR: detailed product org pain points for a friend. Are these common signs among start ups? What are the necessary ingredients for mid-senior ICs to invest time/effort to attempt a change vs cut the loss and leave? Asking the community based on recent conversations with a friend. Perhaps what My friend and I are discussing is a common set of pain points. OR specific to this company. The question: The friend is a mid-senior IC in a product org (100 across product/data/design) supporting product leaders at a consumer-facing unicorn. Given the problems below, should he give-up and leave OR drive f’ing hard to change the org? Maybe these problems are true at all startups. Perhaps I drank too much cheap koolaid at Amazon. Product Management Problems observed: 1. Product Exec doesn’t understand product development lifecycle or agile.. or A/B testing, or OKRs... or prioritization. Doesn’t understand the tech stack or domain areas at a high level. 2. Product leaders do not have strong PM experience. They do not drive their team’s prioritization. They do not hold product reviews that raise the bar of their PM direct reports. Do not enforce trade off decisions. Reluctant to ask their team to stop working on lower priority product opportunities to be considerate of PMs’ feelings. 3. Engineering/Design/Data leaders lean solely on product priorities to initiate work. These teams are Impacted by context switching. Honestly, they are passing off the failure to the product org. No backlog at times for engineering(lol). Engineering org is happy bc they can coast haha. PMs inconsistent on RACI. 4. PMs are well pedigreed, smart, mostly from top-tier MBA programs. But they spend most of the time building and updating presentations. Lots of strategy work. Frequent unilateral and arbitrary change requests to design and spec change for development (2-4 per sprint). High attrition for design org. 5. Product org does not measure progress, no data-driven business review - at any cadence. Most PMs lack product experience from elsewhere. No a/b testing culture even when features impact 100M+ user base. They just launch and move on to whatever PMs think is important next (ie unclear on how roadmap items are prioritized and how resources are allocated). PMs are unsure about priorities (due to product leadership not having backbone or forcing trade offs). 6. Business cases are not required for annual planning/ developing product roadmap. When there is a business case, based on a handful of interviews on 10M+ user base. No real data (even if partial) to back use cases and make resourcing trade offs. 7. OKRs don’t link across the org, metrics are not vetted by leaders (ie poor quality metrics and KPI), no clear guidance from product leaders on priorities, no trade-offs on resourcing. Frankly OKRs seem to be there for show only for the board. KPIs are an afterthought once the year begins and rarely used to evaluate success of business. 8. Product culture of focusing on developments by competition. It is a very competitive market where there isn’t a dominant FANG type company yet. But seems like there’s an imbalance btw customer segment focus and developing product strategy based on recommendations from internal corporate strategy team. 9. Lots of update meetings. A lot of company events. Planning meetings. Cross org meetings. Pulse checks. Social meetings. 10. Design/engineers aren’t consulted on strategy/roadmap or requirements change review. Decisions are just communicated. 11. Lots of thinking and discussing. Leaders don’t review business metrics. No one taking ownership to execute on culture improving change management. 12. CEO is not the founder. Focuses on powerpoint hygiene during meetings (font size color and graphics). Great presentation skills. High bar for presentations to a point where PMs all use ppt, and speech notes for every meeting (ie full sentence slide notes). 13. Engineering leader isnt supportive towards the product org. 14. Heavy heavy product requirements documentation process. Separate ideation document and PRD for every product opportunity are required before tech specs are reviewed and included as part of next quarter’s backlog. 15. No idea backlog. Product leaders think ideas come from PM tools like jira/aha/trello. Which is true tactically speaking... but shouldnt be the source imo. Maybe customer data/metrics + some big bet business case from a PM? 16. No product ops. Or engineering ops. Fake micro services. TPMs just project manage timeline and internal communication since there isnt really that many complex systems and dependencies. 17. CEO driving culture of focusing on formatting of the presentations. She thinks all of this can be solved through formalized processes and templates. 18. People are generally nice. TC is sub industry average on cash. Brand is strong but as a consumer the UX is not as competitive to other offerings. 19. Self-service needs are solved through centralizing functions/role for individuals. In fact the company believes centralizing is the most efficient and does not believe decentralized, autonomous product/eng culture will work. TBH, Im unsure if this is. Red flag. I am biased here. I have more, but decided to write the ones that came to my mind. *Should my friend leave? Or fight the uphill battle where there no real willingness for change* **which of these problems are reasonable vs ridiculous?** ***What are some other signals to determine if this is a sinking ship?*** They raised $$$M+ recently from renowned investors. Tagging random successfully scaled businesses: #product #pm #tech #unicorn #facebook #google #instacart #dropbox #stripe #udemy #lyft #airbnb #coinbase #chime #slack #pinterest #netflix #productmanager Tc:400k/10 yoe