Product at Wayfair
I've been approached about a Senior Product Manager position by a recruiter. I was told it's a management position with direct reports. When I look at job spec's online I see some positions have direct reports, while others don't. There also seems to be associated director positions that have no reports. I've also seen head of product and director position advertised. Can anyone shed light on how the org' structure works?
I got ridiculously high offer. Asked around and realised basically what the above comment says. Stay away at all costs. Search here on blind and you'll know.
How do you define a ridiculously high offer ? What TC for what level and yoe ?
And for what position/level?
Do not do it. I am miserable here. I am actively trying to get out. Wayfair does not do product. It’s glorified project management execution... you’re handed solutions and are expected to execute on those solutions. If you challenge it, you basically put your career in a downward spiral. They want yes-people. Oh.. and when your product inevitably fails or you’re asked to provide results (which you couldn’t derive because you were handed a solution that must be deployed ASAP), you’ll be blamed.
Ha. I said product.. I mean project. :)
This. One product manager in my area got fired after he asked about micro services. It wasn’t part of the directors plan. Keep in mind prior to Wayfair I have as much Product experience as my areas director (0).
Is this the opinion across the board or are there some good departments?
Was exploratory, so any number of departments. What is the entry level position then?
L1: product associate, basically does basic data analysis and tons of testing L2: senior product associate, same as L1 but on broader projects L3: product manager, responsible for entire thread/roadmap; possible (not common) to have direct reports L4: sr product manager, responsible for cross-team “collaboration” and a multi-threaded roadmap/strategy (also possible to have directs) L5: associate product director, not sure what they do since there’s no strategy beyond individual features (usually has directs) The ratios are so effed up though. Some teams have 1:1 pm/eng ratios.. others have 1:10. It’s not based on need/priority; it’s based on who can get the most headcount.
I haven’t heard of good experiences. I’m in operations product. Storefront might be better? But the company as a whole is a giant dumpster fire. No consistent strategy. Bad ex-consultant leadership.
Same on storefront except my area has 1:1 PM to Eng ratio. Means it’s political as shit and engineers have poor WLB so everyone isn’t happy. And it’s not just PMs that are ex Consultants. Even the CTO is an ex consultant. If you have MBB in your background you’ll get an offer.
FYI this account spreads non-stop FUD about Wayfair in every thread. There isn't a single team on Storefront with a 1:1 PM:Eng ratio. Standard is ~1:6. We set quarterly OKRs with a yearly strategy. I can't think of a single PM I know who came straight from consulting (our head of product was McKinsey, but was in startups for a while after). Every high growth company has challenges but nothing is broken afaict. I've been here about a year and plan to stay a while.
Your engineers will be unhappy wherever you go in product. Our tech stack is becoming too unwieldy to manage. Deploys and reverts take hours upon hours as it’s one giant PHP repo. Hard to make progress with spaghetti code. You’ll spend most of your time trying to QA. Just awful. Stay away.
Org is a mess I’m on SF. It’s a matrix between STOs (Cross functional cross department teams) and “independent “ product pods. There are a dozen or so pods each with a director. Some have a single direct report some have a big org. It’s all political and how well you and kingdom build. It’s important to pair your politically strong engineering ADs with product directors. Why? That’s how everything is resourced since all 3500+ job openings you see are ranked. If one functional leader is stronger you end up with 25:1 or 1:1 eng to PM ration, both suck ball sack. Then design is a joke. In my area over 50% of the designers left in Q2, some even before their year mark. It’s that bad they walked away from thousands in stock options just to get the fuck out. Do you really want to join that?
Sup that’s me 👋🏼 I think I need to stop spending so much of my work time on Blind
I am a Sr. PM in OPI. I also got a pretty high offer and now i am sick of long hours , trying to please both business and engineers. No clear strategy and lack of bandwidth. Plus changing teams is also not easy. I made a bad choice coming here you shouldn't.Stay away.
Avoid at all costs
So... I had a friend who worked there briefly as a data science product manager. He left within 6 months because that place was a nightmare and made no serious progress to achieve any changes
I think his specific role was called something else (honestly don't remember it right now), but the teams he worked with were BI and DS focused.