Welch Allyn – “Friendly environment”

Pros

This is a fairly social environment and there is plenty of opportunity for clear communication*. People are often encouraged to innovate and explore their own ideas. It is easy to become a part of a project for which you have enthusiasm, making for generally happy and productive teams. Many projects give participants a clear area for which they can take pride and ownership. Everyone has the opportunity to be respected in their area.
Management is very approachable.

Cons

Management fails to initiate their own communication* before they begin to take reactive action. There is poor upward understanding of technological capabilities and timelines, and poor downward management-driven vision. The directives that are driven downward are contorted, and show management's lack of understanding or faith in the product. Engineers become off-track and focus on deadlines and requirements rather than vision - management fails to see issues in current projects as being failures with planning on earlier projects, and so doesn't focus on better technical planning.

Advice to Senior Management

Sit down with the people developing your products and understand how the pieces work, and how the anticipated effort compares to other projects. You are likely to find that time is invested in products with little potential, and there is lots of potential in projects nobody is pursuing.

It is irresponsible to engineer a solution and ask an engineer to implement it. Instead, find goal, target or need and ask an engineer to engineer the solution for you. Foster strong communication between marketing, management and engineering to keep engineers on track.