Private equity found another industry to destroy - Senior Manager UserTesting Employee Review

UserTesting private equity owners have created a terrible company in UserTesting. The first CEO was more or less a nice guy but had pretty bad ideas and didn't seem to know much about research, which is important to have if you're a company that sells research, and software to do research. The company is now in a position where it has not made money in over a year and the people who paid billions of dollars for it are worried. Their current strategy is to remove pretty much everyone who works there (starting with the almost entirely terrible c-suite, to their credit) and working their way down until they've removed anyone who knows anything about how to make the company run. Eventually it will be completely filled with robotic business people who can sell themselves to other robotic business people to get hired but don't know anything about research and will continue to be confused as to why they can't sell good deals that last. None of the sales leadership seem to have any idea what it is that is being sold, they can't seem to see examples of what works and what doesn't work and learn, and the turnover in sales leadership has been insane in the last year and a half. Because the sales leadership don't know anything about what they're selling, the people they hire also don't know anything about what they're selling. The sales team just goes after what will get them a commission in the short term without any worry about whether or not it's actually any good for the customers they sell to, i.e., whether what they sell will be renewed, which again, is kind of the whole purpose of an enterprise software company. UserTesting ran with the most insanely bloated yet also absolutely useless marketing team for the better part of a year. When you asked marketing to do something like, say, build some customer facing materials for help with selling some product (like, a one pager), the standard answer you got was that it would take about a month. The CMO was a downright awful person who vocally called to cut different departments, depending on the day. She also did not know anything about research, somehow. Somehow this was an entire department where none of them seemingly did anything, and yet because they are a marketing team they made it seem like they were doing a lot. The culture at UserTesting reflects this. Some people there were good, smart, passionate people, but the majority were absolutely not. The majority of people were there to get a paycheck and rather than try to make that last as long as possible by doing things that would be good for the long term outcomes of the company, they instead brushed problems under the rug and hoped they wouldn't resurface. The common line from UserTesting leadership is that bad reviews of UT are from a minority of disgruntled employees. I am not disgruntled, This is an opinion developed from years of interaction with UT before and after the merger last year and I said these things privately before my end at UT came about. I would not work here, I would not recommend anyone who wants to actually do something important for their paycheck work here.