Pros
I have had the chance to see the company more than double in size since I joined and it has been amazing to see how much everyone cares deeply about the future of education and Minerva's mission. Having Minerva Schools and Minerva Project working side by side has allowed the company to build a solid foundation and they can now leverage those learnings to support new partners very effectively. Just like many companies facing a quick growth, there were bumps on the road during the transition, but I think leadership has been very open and receptive to feedback which has helped going over the hump. Now things feel more mature, teams are better organized, the company is in a great position to move forward and accelerate its development. The product team is still small (~20 people) but extremely competent! Even though people have areas of expertise, everybody is full-stack and gets to wear many hats. The team is diverse, distributed across the US, Europe and Middle East, and very remote friendly. There is a lot of trust and support from the managers and they really try their best to help you grow your technical and soft skills. Over the past year, there has been a tremendous effort to update the tech stack to newer technology, from the frontend (migrating Backbone to React), to the backend (migrating all services to python 3), and infrastructure (moving from opsworks to kubernetes). A lot of automation and code quality improvements have been put in place as well and engineers actively engage in weekly meetings for knowledge sharing and technology centered discussions.
Cons
Having a small team lets you grow your skills in multiple directions and at a pretty fast pace, but the downside is that the number of roles is limited (for now). Another issue with having a small team and a quickly growing business, is that some things don't scale very well. For example, it's hard to keep up with new bugs and features while staying on track with planned work. Since COVID, even though things like "donut" on slack have been put in place to facilitate meeting new people in the organization, it's harder to create tight bonds with other teams like it used to be possible to when everybody was gathering at the yearly all company event.