Good company/bad company
Choices that companies make for current and future employees 2025-09-16 #management
Now that I find myself looking for a new product management job, it might make more sense to start by looking for companies than vacancies. Start-ups often bypass their own published vacancies, and one company I looked at now only recruits from their existing network.
The popularity of toxic management often introduces red flags for companies. If you know any good companies that want to hire a senior product manager (Europe-remote or Rotterdam) then please introduce me. Meanwhile, read on to learn about good companies and bad companies.
People
Good companies curate teams of people who treat each other well and build trust. Bad companies tolerate assholes, who make the working environment toxic and unproductive, so good people leave.
Good companies do the work to make their teams diverse, and benefit from their varied experiences. Bad companies pay lip service to diversity for employees in junior roles, while their management teams consists only of white men.
Good companies encourage remote work, the trust-building it requires, and the inclusivity it enables. Bad companies prioritise status symbol office buildings over their employees’ lives, and hire only from locally-based populations.
Good companies promote good managers. Bad companies tolerate bad managers.
Strategy
Good companies pursue a stated mission whose success would make the world better. Bad companies only externalise costs, such as environmental damage and worker exploitation, with the sole purpose of enriching their owners.
Good companies promote good-faith visions, and work earnestly towards them. Bad companies generate hype and mislead their markets, defraud people who invest in their snake oil, and pollute problem spaces with mistrust and consumer backlash.
Good companies tell a coherent story about something real that people care about. Bad companies tell stories without having anything tangible to tell a story about, and generate marketing noise pollution.
Good companies develop working products and services that people want to use to solve real problems. Bad companies sell junk.
Execution
Good companies create alignment between teams, and nurture collaboration. Bad companies set up internal conflicts between different teams and roles, and waste employees’ energy on internally-focused political manoeuvring and interpersonal drama.
Good companies let employees adopt tools that make them more effective in their work. Bad companies impose bad tools that optimise for management conservatism and financial consolidation, while blaming the consequences on employee productivity problems.
Good companies encourage experimentation, learn what works, and improve how they work. Bad companies resist change, stick to their executives’ previous companies’ failed approaches, and remain in denial about their old-fashioned ideas.
Good companies embrace transparency, trust people to handle information responsibly, and do the work to resolve awkward truths. Bad companies fetishise secrecy, tolerate operational ignorance, and create a culture of leaders that fear honesty.
