Typeform Reviews

Pros

- Lots talented people across the company, especially in engineering, design, marketing and data science - Highly dedicated colleagues working hard to get Typeform to the next level - People are very friendly - One of the most loved and lovable products in the B2B SaaS space - Innovation is picking up pace with a good pipeline of new products/features to bring to market - strong customer focus - strong... leadership team with desire to do what's right for the company, not what's easy - much clearer focus, goals and strategy than previously - good cross-functional working relationships among the various teams - tons of perks, beautiful office, catered lunches everyday and great events!

Cons

- lots of change (which is to be expected for a company at this stage) - still tuning the goal setting process (OKRs) but it's getting better - more investment needed to scale up product development (more designers, developers, PMs) in order to meet the company goals over next 5 years

Advice to Management

Keep the teams focused and reiterate the focus regularly. Keep making decisions and ensure the company moves forward as a single unit. Keep encouraging Typeformers to think big and challenge one another to improve in both the product and their processes.

Pros

Salaries are good and the perks (gym membership, healthy food, drinks, coffee, private health insurance, unlimited vacation, flexible work, language courses, learning & development allowance) are fantastic. There are a lot of nice people willing to help each other and some teams have a good environment where you can have fun, collaborate and and learn while working.

Cons

1) We currently have a culture of fear, which means anyone can be fired on the spot for no reason. This has happened several times. One person got fired when a new hire took his position, only 10 days after being assured that this wouldn't happen. Another one got fired even though the entire team worked well with him and he proved to be one of the most efficient and innovative team members, bringing a lot of value... and building bridges with other teams. Another one got fired because the newly hired boss didn't like him and the fact that the rest of the team did and valued his contributions didn't matter. Another one got fired leaving a team with only 1 person doing the job of 4. And so on, and so on. 2) Managers seem to be untouchable and can get away with anything. For example, they can lie to their employees' faces or prevent people from being promoted, making up rules that don't exist. They tend to be arrogant people with inflated egos who disregard any opinion coming from anyone at a more junior position. They favor employees they get on well with while bullying the ones they personally dislike. 3) HR managed to make everyone in the team leave, so it's now composed of people who have been in the company not longer than 6-8 months. They consistently encourage employees to talk to them if they have any problem and promise to help. The reality is that they don't do anything to help because they don't acknowledge that in some cases, the problems are directly caused by the managers. On some occasions they have breached the confidentiality of those meetings. 4) The members of the Leadership Team have neither people nor public speaking skills so Company meetings have become an unbearable ordeal where they either bore everyone or angrily explain data/decisions made. 5) There is no clear direction and Company values and goals seem to change every few months.

Advice to Management

- Be more humble, listen to the people, acknowledge their concerns and get involved in helping overcome them. You have excellent professionals working for you and you'll lose them all if you don't change your attitude. - Either get trained in public speaking or hire a professional speaker to present at meetings. Also, please don't go overtime in meetings and please, please stop telling us about your fantastic... life experiences if they're not relevant to the company's present and future. - Be transparent and work towards restoring trust.

Pros

As most reviews pointed out already - The perks are among the best you could find in Barcelona. - The product and the offices - The people you work with is quite good in Engineering, so many talented and skilled colleagues - Some people really want to make the company successful

Cons

- The amount of changes in management recently that come from nowhere is huge, and its getting worse every month - All C levels have been replaced by friends-of-friends of other C levels, with little to no diversity - Some of the C level employees lack skills like communication and emotional intelligence - In the last months there have been direct hires with no process, which at some point could be ok, but some... of those hires have caused entire departments to vanish or disappear, mostly because the lack of cultural fit in them, causing former employees with 2 years of experience, valuable employes to the company, to leave - One of those hires took more than a month for HR to act, even when lots of people were already complaining and saying that this specific person was not suitable or beneficial for the company. It took so much time for them to react that few people left the company in that time because working was unbearable - While right now the perks look amazing, its clear that this is not going to be last for long - Sending emails at 10 pm on the weekends, sometimes asking for you to work on something, has become more and more common - There are no almost no managers left, and the ones they are still around lack enough skills ( or better said, up to date skills ) to do their job properly - The whole company relies on something called OKRs, which are supposed to be objectives to aim for. You spend a month definining them, doing meetings and presentations just for the company to pop out a project out of nowhere that renders all that time spent useless - Some projects are being defined and estimated by people that doesnt have enough domain knowledge on the product, to the point of missing important features and setting up dates that are not realistic without compromising quality on what you deliver - Theres flexible working and unlimited holidays. Some people is not making enough use of those, but others are abusing too much of it, to the point of being months or weeks completely away - Engineering lacks leadership and lacks communication between the teams that are working in different features - You might have a team of 7-8 people for a project with low priority while you have 2-3 engineers for working with legacy and infrastructural stuff that is core to the platform - Instead of helping those small teams to get more resources the new hires go directly to new teams with new projects - Once an engineering project is done, the team gets disbanded and the ownership is lost - No career framework - Almost all HR has changed, to the point that only a few are keeping up to date with what they do and they can´t handle everything - Theres no help on where you want to go as an engineer - Too many useless meetings. We have spent more time on assemblies and "clarity" meetings lately than anything else. The processes are so shady and everything is so gossipy that everytime someone leaves we have to do a company wide meeting to explain what happened - Lack of clarity on processes - The few managers left and the C levels are not listening or seeing through their employees, when they act is too late - Theres a huge gap between old people in the company and new hires - The culture of the company is heading towards working more hours in the office, which doesnt mean being more efficient - People is afraid of speaking up, it went from open up forums to noone saying anything because of fear

Advice to Management

- Listen to your employees, they are the ones who built the company and some of them have been there for more than 3 years, not just a few months. They understand more than you what was Typeform, they have more knowledge, context and wisdom than people who recently joined and you listen more to them just because their salary is higher - Stop the OKRs, they are completely useless when you dont follow or believe in... them - Get some trainings either in public speaking or management - If your idea of working at Typeform involves working on weekends or nights, be clear about it and set some expectations - The best way of shutting down rumors or gossiping is being clear on what you do, not sending an email that generates even more rumors or calling for an assembly where you cant speak openly without fear As of now, the main danger for Typeform is not their competitors, is its management. It seems you are working really, really hard on making the company fail. Maybe you are not aware of but every week you loose someone with knowledge on something that noone else does. Every week the processes get worse, the quality of what we ship gets worse. Theres going to be a point of no return where the product will reach an state that recovering from it will be nearly impossible

Pros

Up to 6 months ago, the best people you ever worked with. Amazing vibes. Great office and perks. All gone now. Destroyed by terrible leadership.

Cons

The new CEO is a sociopath. Sacked anyone who ever disagreed with him. Then replaced them with a bunch of mediocres who agree to anything he says and feed his insatiable ego. Most were appointed with no previous process. Lots of people being fired for no apparent reason other than speaking their mind. Everyone lives in fear. No progress whatsoever in over one year since the changes in leadership.

Advice to Management

You managed to take over the best company in town and turn it into the worst. You should be proud.

Pros

Great co-workers, smart and nice people. Barception. Lunch.

Cons

Really disappointed with the lack of preofiesionalism from the leadership team and founders. Lack of recognition to hard work, bad feedback and performance assestments (actually, inexistent). The new people coming to leadership (including the CEO) value more that you agree with them than actually having ideas and that you are doing your job well. The paths to professional growth are completely broken, so if you care... about your career and growth, this is not the place. Really shady moves to let people go or firing them.

Advice to Management

Listen to employees, prepare them and set the for success as professionals and you'll have a successful company. It's not the other way round.

Pros

The people still left are really great and talented.

Cons

- New CEO => completely new leadership team => tons of avoidable big mistakes => A LOT of people left and leaving => understaffing => lowering hiring quality bar - Same old story: Let's try OKRs! Oh but we need to do this other thing not part of the objectives, it's very urgent, you need to drop everything and do this! Hey, how come you didn't hit your objectives? Well, let's define better... objectives next quarter!

Advice to Management

Typeform had a beautiful culture of good engineering, don't destroy it with random deadlines. You made it seem like you cared about people and company culture in our last crisis, it looks like everything is out the window again, please listen to employees.

Pros

- Best human beings I've ever worked with. - Dedicated and hard working colleagues

Cons

- Pay attention to the negative reviews here. You'll see a trend about leadership. Concerned that negative reviews could hurt recruiting, HR department is just now replying to some reviews and asking some employees to post positive reviews, but if you have ambitions to grow and want to be respected, look elsewhere. - We used to have “natural leaders”, but they’ve decided it was better to part ways with them. -... Managers can be incredibly disorganised, incompetent and bullies, often treating adults like kids. - No one enjoys being micro-managed, but it’s even worse when your leader fundamentally lacks faith in your opinions and expertise. It’s completely demoralising and stunts the professional growth of the individual. - Too often, the concept of culture is lumped in with the “soft stuff” category of business, even though they sell it as a number one priority. It's not true! We used to have a great culture with great values, but just a small few live by these values. - Nobody comes to work for the snacks. Perks are used to distract from poor leadership and culture. It’s possible to work in and with a company where the negatives are small things that can be improved, such as inadequate benefits, or insufficient training. Poor leadership and culture emanates from the top and is unlikely to change anytime soon. - Leadership toxicity and incompetence are not directly related. Both competent – getting the desired results - and incompetent leadership can be toxic. The destructive leadership is killing engagement and productivity.

Advice to Management

- Review leadership team with fine comb. Create a safe environment for employees to voice their candid feedback on upper management. Your team wishes to be treated as equals, not as kids.

Pros

Colleagues are really hardworking and funny people, you can always rely on them.

Cons

Typeform used to have an amazing culture, and I have been so proud to work here. However, after the former co-CEOs were replaced with a new CEO last year, everything went to hell: -The entire leadership team was completely replaced, and the new leaders now have no clue of what's going on and how teams work, and they run the company with a culture of fear. -We used to have a culture of speaking up, and... disagreeing with your managers was fine and always welcome. Now disagreeing can put you in a bad spot, and eventually get you fired. This is because leaders and managers are insecure and they feel threatened by people smarter than them. -In the past few months, I have seen more people getting fired than in my entire professional career. There's no week where we don't receive an email saying that a colleague has been fired (or "let go", as leadership prefers to call it). This creates a very low morale and creates an environment where no one dares to speak. -The HR department is not a safe place anymore. There have been instances of people raising concerns, and HR managers didn't keep confidentiality and just run to that person's manager to tell on them. -If your manager doesn't like you, he/she will do anything to get you fired. -High turnover of staff and general dissatisfaction. -No real career opportunities. Wrong people getting promoted to management positions just because of seniority, not because of real skills. -Last but not least: lack of diversity in the company, they hire the same person over and over again. Starting from the leadership team, which is made entirely of white males (with the exception of one woman). Please do not believe positive reviews anymore, they are written by management who are desperate to make the company look good, so they can find candidates to replace those they fired. It's such a shame, this was such an amazing company, who has been ruined by bringing in the wrong people and putting them in roles with too much power.

Advice to Management

I know you won't listen, because we already tried to give feedback and nothing changed. At this point, I think the only solution would be to replace the entire leadership team and the CEO with some solid leaders that were ready to listen and embrace diversity of opinions and approaches, and that valued people over their own personal gain.