Rant: Why Cisco Webex is the crappiest place to be.

Ever wondered why even though we had almost had a 10-year headstart, why zoom ate our lunch? How did "zoom" become a verb synonymous with video meetings and not Webex. let me give you an inside scoop: 1. Product leadership sucks. They are literally clueless. I bet no one has ever picked up a product book and seen how a user-centric design is supposed to work. Most of the leadership works for 2-3 customer accounts Bank of America, RBC, AT&T among the top few. The entire roadmap is littered with "customer asks". Whatever they ask they just mindlessly build it. I have been asked to prioritize features that are done to please a CEO (one user) of a company. Mind you at the expense of an entire roadmap. On a conversation, one VP of product candidly shared until a few years ago they didn't even know how to market their features or fight for account renewal. since there were no alternates auto-renewal was the norm for all the customers. they had to hire people to create slides. they didnt have a marketing slide deck. 2. Entire leadership (across engineering, product) comprise of cisco-old farts: Not a comment on age but "cisco-age" i.e. people who have been rotting at grade 10-11 for the last 10 years finally got to a director level and they don't know what to make of it. Like a manager in a govt company in India, they know how things work here and no one wants to disrupt the status quo. They know no one outside cisco will hire them let alone at a director position, they are just waiting to spend the next few years before retirement here. 3. To counter the above issue in #2 leadership are now going overboard and hiring Microsoft and amazon discards and putting them at the top of the old farts in #2. No one knows how to make the best of the situation.... 50+-year-old reporting to 35- 40-year-olds. These people now got the bloated titles and now are shopping around to get the same title in a better more growth centric company. 4. I had high hopes with Jitu, but he turned out to be another dud. He has been Cisco-institutionalized as well. He keeps on blabbering some random buzz words like 3-d meetings, augmented reality, which is nowhere on the roadmap. 5. UX team sucks. The most pretentious, egotistical, ignorant and incompetent bunch of people I have ever worked with. There is absolutely nothing delightful about Webex, Webex messaging and all other related products' UX. they try to be clever and fun, but most of the time the final designs come out, what I will describe as "wannabe's". The overall experience across the board is very bureaucratic. The overall lack of imagination is only parallelled by the bloated ego of these UX designers and managers. I have never seen a more incompetent and dumb bunch of people in my entire life as the UX managers at Webex, period. They try to hire people and good candidates just say no to the managers during the interview. Heard things are so bad that some managers now have premium LinkedIn and are now spamming people. We have open positions and literally no one is applying. Good people who are here, are looking to get out and few who left immediately and very easily doubled their compensation. Guess time for me to pack up and leave as well. #pardonbadgrammar #writtenonmobile #rant #webex