[ltbarcly3]

Evernote has almost 500 employees? How is that even possible? There must be at least 350 product managers. (Ok, that was a joke, but if you look at all their employees on linkedin like 2/3 have job titles that are in the 'overhead' bucket. Tons of 'People Ops', 'Brand and Communications', 'Marketing Manager', 'Product Designer', 'Producer'. 37 have a job title that includes 'marketing'. 391 appear to be non-engineering titles, out of 538 employees in the linkedin results. They have full time Agile coaches!!)

500+ employees with an annual revenue estimated to be below $10MM. That's $20k of revenue per employee! I mean I can just imagine what it's like there, insane meetings about metrics where 15 marketing managers show the powerpoint slides they spent the last week emailing back and forth to highlight the 2% growth last quarter, while they need to grow by 2000% in the next 48 months just to stay alive. Then in 3 months they have the same meeting.

Evernote has been severely mismanaged (I've been saying this since 2012, links below). I wonder how they feel about all the VC money they spent developing ports for WebOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4855689

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859391

[ironjunkie]

Not working at Evernote, but that definitely sounds like way too close to home.

The issue with Product Manager, Marketing managers etc is that those people are usually really good at marketing THEMSELVES and creating a mess of internal politics by doing so. They are needed but if you have too many of them pass a certain threshold and the whole company will never recover.

This seems to be unfortunately what is happening at Evernote.

[haywire2018]

Posting anon for obvious reasons.

The Product Managers at our company seem to:

1. Optimize going to lots of conferences which always happen to be at great locations

2. Cant provide more detailed "what did you learn at the conference" responses than useless boilerplate "customers are excited about xyz and there is huge growth there"

3. Create "partnerships" that sounds great with nice press releases but there is almost never any retrospective on how much sales $ these partnerships brought

4. Usually know very little about actual platform constraints and push cool-sounding ideas which incur massive technical debt

5. Love to create one-off demonstrations products that conveniently avoid hard questions about the technical platform and nicely shine to the c-suite and stick the ugliness of technical debt they bring to the engineers

6. Spend most of their day on Linked In hunting for the next sucker company

[sidcool]

Wow. How do such people survive in high pressure workplaces? And doesn't the leadership have any clue?

[kamaal]

Mostly its symbiosis. When you have that much waste in the management layers, there is high degree of mutual political co-operation. This is even more easy in a 'Product Manager' position, you have quite literally no deliverables and almost nothing to report to your immediate manager(Who themselves have no deliverables). Often the thing they have to show are some metrics, which are generated by engineers, even the information that goes into the slides comes from engineers. So they basically 'own' the product, in the sense they get to make go-nogo calls during product launches.

Product managers are also insanely famous for killing features just to assert authority(This apparently comes while trying to appear like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs said no to features, so we say no.).

The people managers don't put up a fight because they too are probably over staffed. The Managers/Real-Contributor ratio is high, and they know if they open their mouths and protest, their jobs are on the line next. So they let things go on.

A while back 'Program Managers' were in a similar state in most companies. I know places where they fired the entire Program management org and didn't notice any change, not even a faint pain. That was how contribution-less the whole hierarchy was.

The other part is obvious. These companies are full of VC money. They didn't earn it. The founders didn't earn it. Its free. After all its not like a loan you pay back, if the company falters, the founders or anybody of authority doesn't owe a dime to the investors. So they splurge. They spend on people. Most importantly they spend on their friends, who can help them get jobs else where.

[ta564756856]

All people are more susceptible to charismatic others than we'd like to admit I think.

People will tend to believe and trust them more, and so they can spin the narrative however they'd like (and often they're the layer of separation between devs and the higher-level management that precludes the higher-ups even getting first-hand exposure to some issues).

Edit: I also think charismatic others can do this without always knowing it i.e. in a self-interest sort of sense.

[andrei_says_]

You will really enjoy Dan Lyon’s Disrupted. It’s a book which doesn’t pull punches in its description of hubspot.

[brogrammernot]

This isn’t how it should be but damn, it does exist. I switched into a product role after being in engineering after 5 years and it amazes me how many decisions are made without any consideration for the technical implications.

Even with my engineering background (full stack, leaning closer to front-end) I still pair with my engineering team lead for all planning activities for the quarter.

I’m not sure what org/comapny you work for, but in my experience (little over a year) I’ve had engineers tell me I make their lives a lot easier b/c I’m the umbrella that keeps them out of meetings, always dedicate some of the quarter to tech debt, and try to get them involved in early meetings as needed around the larger “moon shot” type of product features.

So maybe n=1, but I’ve also had zero attrition on my team of 10 engineers and hiring has been easier but most engineers haven’t had a product manager who used to be an engineer (I’ll always claim to be one heart) so maybe the issue is lack of technical awareness around the product they’re owning.

[ltbarcly3]

> They are needed but ...

I really don't agree. The person in charge needs to have enough technical insight to have a good sense of the overall health of the team and whether reasonable progress is being made. They also need to have a sense of what is a 'good' product and what about the product needs to be improved.

Lets say the person in charge is not technical. The first thing that will happen is someone will get behind on what they are working on, and they will make some excuse (the database was reindexing or some nonsense), and the boss will believe them. From then on everyone knows they can slack off and get away with it, so productivity drops to almost 0.

Next the boss brings in technical managers to supervise the programmers, because he knows nothing is getting done but he doesn't know enough to call anybody out. This makes things much worse, since each manager is primarily motivated to be promoted, and the best way to be promoted is to demonstrate your ability to manage a large team. To get a larger team managers will deliver everything just a little too slow but hold out the carrot that if they had another person things could get done more quickly. In reality the managers are even less technically capable than the Boss, because they were interviewed and hired by the Boss. Boss's love throwing money at a problem, and team size grows and grows but managers can't actually push the team to get more done because they don't have any idea what is going on. The managers basically don't care about that anyway, since increasing productivity wouldn't help them and they can get favors in return by hiring someone's cousin.

Now there are hundreds of programmers and a dozen managers getting less done than the original 5 programmers. Lots of the programmers are extremely incompetent, hired due to nepotism or by mistake. They will never be fired because the manager would be admitting they made a mistake, or worse they might not get to hire a replacement if they fire this person, and this conflicts with their main goal of increasing their teams size to get a promotion.

Somebody has to plan work for all these programmers, and most of them are incompetent and don't care about the product. As a result, the quality is terrible. When confronted by the obvious bugs, they try to weasel out of it, and the boss is now very busy trying to keep customers and deal with emergencies (the database is down again!) to keep checking for all the obvious problems, so armies of QA people are hired. At some point a product manager is hired and once one is in the building they will hire 5 more within a year. Now you have 6 product managers having meetings with each other literally all day, and having not even a basic idea of what is going on they will start making plans. Since the programmers look busy when they are not seen or heard from so they just hide as much as possible and try not to attract attention, or put on headphones and stare at their monitors. The Product Managers look busy when they are having meetings, so they are always in every meeting, and pretty soon they insinuate themselves as the go betweens since they are always talking to the boss and the programmers are never around. Now the boss has even less idea what is going on since all the information getting to the boss is going through PMs who have literally no understanding of what is going on, and who get almost all of their information from other PMs, who get almost all their information from other PMs.

If this is a small company it is now basically in the same situation as Evernote is in now, and will go out of business soon, and if it's a large company the original boss has made such a mess and wasted so much money that the team he manages is large enough that the boss can get promoted to VP.

OR

The person in charge has enough technical understanding to keep his 10 programmers honest and make reasonable plans and be respected, and he keeps the team size at 10 super productive, happy programmers. If it's a small company he sells it to a big company for a huge pile of money, and if it's at a big company he gets passed over for promotion to VP because the job goes to some idiot that has managed to hire 500 incompetent programmers, 250 QA testers, and 200 PMs.

[coredog64]

For a moment I thought you were describing my employer.

[bob33212]

Exactly. Also, these PMs are likely to act in a way that will get good developers to quit and will not hire someone because they are too competent. I don't think it is always malicious though. They view themselves as a valuable part of software development. So when someone says that micromanaging good developers and putting them in 15 meeting a week is counterproductive, the PM assumes that person is lying or wrong. I MEAN IF NO ONE IS MANAGING THE DEVELOPERS, NOTHING WILL GET DONE.

[justin_vanw]

> I MEAN IF NO ONE IS MANAGING THE DEVELOPERS, NOTHING WILL GET DONE.

What they don't realize is that if you put nontechnical people in charge of programmers, nothing will get done.

[camelite]

brilliant! I don't have experience in big companies, but for sheer comedic value, I have to commend you!

[reilly3000]

Wow. It takes more than engineers to run a company. Unlike a lot of the engineering squad, marketers come up with the copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing and more that convince strangers to become users and users to become customers. How does an engineering team prioritize what to work on based on feedback from tens of millions of users across every country on the globe and most hardware/software platforms. Are engineers suppose to recruit, train, pay, and manage themselves? Are customers suppose to support themselves? Or is a script going to take care of that?

B2C companies are hard, partially because it takes lots of C's to make the B viable, and working with C's is expensive.

[coldtea]

>It takes more than engineers to run a company. Unlike a lot of the engineering squad, marketers come up with the copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing and more that convince strangers to become users and users to become customers.

Yes, but not much more, especially if you're just a glorified notes app, which other companies manage to be with 1/10 the workforce.

And all that "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing" hasn't worked that well for Evernote.

[sgt]

To be honest (and not to seem arrogant), I know a lot of extremely talented engineers who have on occasion - or would be perfectly capable of - coming up with copy, art, offers, banners, ux and spend some time on marketing. And it would be automated.

[kristianc]

> And all that "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing" hasn't worked that well for Evernote.

Apparently there's more to marketing than "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing".

All of these are tactics and don't tell you how you're going to make money or what your product and positioning should look like when your low-end use case is given away for free on 90% of phones (Notes, Google Keep), and the high-end is bundled in at zero-marginal cost with the Office 365 subscription your workplace has (OneNote).

How many companies are competing with Google, Apple and Microsoft?

[tallanvor]

It would appear that the product itself hasn't worked that well for Evernote either, so there's obviously blame to go around.

[rchaud]

> And all that "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing" hasn't worked that well for Evernote.

But it has worked for companies like say, Airbnb, which in its inception was a glorified Craigslist, but today is the world's biggest "hotel company" by some metrics.

[shady-lady]

Airbnb wouldn't be 1/100th the size it is if it wasn't for crossing the line between their original (public) plan(rent out unused space in your primary residence) vs their current plan (be an unregulated hotel with better returns than the long term rental market can offer)

Much like Uber, skirting & ignoring local regulations pays off handsomely.

[reilly3000]

225 Million users later...

[cableshaft]

Are they active, recurring users? I bet a good number of those are people who tried it for a week or two, realized it didn't cover their needs or they couldn't keep up with it or they didn't like all their information siloed in one application or something, and then stopped using it.

Like I tried Evernote once, for example, and I'm probably counted in that list of users, but I never used it for more than a couple of days before going back to Google Keep and Google Docs (with some Scrivener when I want to make an ebook).

[coldtea]

It's easy to get tons of users if you're selling $10 dollar bills for $1 dollar.

[jaynate]

Vast majority of whom have never paid a dime for an Evernote product.

[iterati]

User isn't the same as customer, though. Evernote needs customers. They only have users.

[AmericanChopper]

Depending on how their funding was structured, perhaps they might have had too high a head count. But if their problem was too little revenue, then you’d want them to have more sales and marketing (and to a lesser extent product) people over more engineers.

[snaky]

> It takes more than engineers to run a company

It depends. First company of Evernote founder was run by engineers, had a contracts with Apple (Newton handwriting recognition technology), Disney, Microsoft, and their tech is still sorting mail at USPS[1]. This is the photo of the Paragraph team circa 1991 - https://maxkotin.com/2018/03/12/book-about-paragraph/

[1] https://www.parascript.com/usps-awards-parascript-contract-f...

[cpach]

”It takes more than engineers to run a company.”

Yes, that is true. It’s still possible to hire too many people, be it engineers or designers or sales reps.

[ltbarcly3]

Let me tell a story:

Lets say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it's good furniture but even despite huge investments they can't seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around.

You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a combination of machines and human workers. Some people are employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture, either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and operating the automated machinery. Things aren't perfect, but you aren't going to make any changes on your first day so you make some notes and move on. The furniture hasn't changed much over the years, it is still basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The furniture gets 'improved' from time to time, you see a step stool with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a webcam built into it, but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the webcam on any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so they can reach things that are up high. There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the product managers have decided that the next feature will be to add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out the press release announcing "ScentedStools", so the machines need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like "Fresh Linen" by the end of the week. There are daily status meetings to update them on the progress. If the "Fresh Linen" stools aren't being produced by Thursday they are going to start having two status meetings per day.

You hear it's someone named Jim's last day, so you set up an exit interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs don't really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he just sits and reads the news, his "nontechnical" manager doesn't know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there's no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting at his desk and looking at his monitor. Since US labor laws don't allow Jim's manager to set specific hours for him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren't done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody upstairs "could tell white oak from red oak". It takes about 5 minutes to give his status update but he's expected to stay for the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read furniturenews.com. He says he is quitting to take a much lower paying job because he is bored and doesn't respect his manager.

Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people having meetings with each other about annual plans and prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day, but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks really understand furniture very well, they can't really tell good furniture from bad furniture, they literally don't know the difference between solid oak and cardboard, they don't know how long it takes or how much money it costs to build a chair. After a few days of meetings you haven't met anyone who cares about furniture at all, they all seem to want to work at the furniture factory because it pays well, or they like the prestige of being 'in furniture'. Mostly they talk about how overworked they are and make the case for hiring a few more people. If they could hire another person for their team they wouldn't be so far behind. You aren't sure what they are getting behind in, are they talking about meetings they can't attend because it conflicts with another meeting that is more important somehow? Do they need more time to work on power point slides for the next days meetings? Some of the office folks have degrees in furniture science, but none of them have ever successfully built or designed any furniture outside of little school projects.

Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.

How do you fix this company?

[jwdunne]

Wow. You know, I read your original comment with the opinion that it was very programmer-centric but this narrative made me think deeper about what you're trying to say.

I think Evernote sucks and they need to refocus, things that have already been said to death. But it's amazing how a narrative, storytelling, can make me re-examine my own initial opinion like that.

[nwatson]

>> I think Evernote sucks and they need to refocus ...

I don't think Evernote sucks in whole ... I very happily pay for Evernote annually-renewed premium subscription, and it's great at doing what I rent it for ...

+ it accepts documents, scans, photographs, text in notes that I can put in categories

+ it clips web page content through browser extensions and saves them as notes

+ it accepts emails composed and sent to it, and emails forwarded to it, turning them into notes

+ it does great OCR on scanned/photographed notes and documents

+ it does great matching on searches, from both explicit text and OCR'ed content

+ the browser interface is great, the Android, macOS, Windows apps are pretty decent

... and that's all I want.

Evernote's seen their missed opportunities and has tried to catch up:

+ they want to be Slack with channeled- and threaded-messaging -- Slack works better

+ they want to be the business document repository -- I much prefer Confluence (or other Wikis) for structuring and storing long-term relevant information

+ they want to be an issue tracker

+ ... every other collaboration thing under the sun

They've been pushing hard on all these multi-user shared-content angles. It seems like both a technical and marketing challenge -- they likely are too boxed-in and the jump a customer needs to make to envision using Evernote's new business/multi-user/collaboration features is too big.

[baldfat]

Once the founders left and their "Building a company that will be here 100 years from now" left I left using it. I now use Boost Notes and Google Keep works better for me.

They have all those employees but does Evernote do anything new to make people's life easier in a different way the past ten years??? I answer no.

[baldfat]

Burn the furniture outside. Its losing you business.

Fire the marketing team. (Seen this happened at colleges before)

Hire someone within from the floor as upper management that is the furniture expert. Give them actual power to ruffle feathers.

Hire outside a few middle managers from successful companies and pay them well.

CEO talks about how everyone needs to love what we make and do, furniture.

Company has managers work the floor for two weeks on a rotating schedule for the first 6 months. Each manager does two different jobs for a week each. Pepsi does this every year. Friend of mine was in upper management and he drove a truck and delivered products a week a year.

Restructure after 9 months and get rid of people who don't buy in who more then likely will leave on their own.

[thirdsun]

> Company has managers work the floor for two weeks on a rotating schedule for the first 6 months. Each manager does two different jobs for a week each. Pepsi does this every year. Friend of mine was in upper management and he drove a truck and delivered products a week a year.

I like that idea. Let managers deal with the details of the product or service. Have them exposed to countless, tiny, everyday pains and problems, which are invisible when handling big picture ideas.

For companies that deal with digital goods instead of physical products temporary low level support rotation might be a chance to get higher level positions down in the trenches. Basecamp seems to use such a system: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3676-everyone-on-support

[kamaal]

You are suggesting great action items. But who is going to implement them? Whom do you get to make this happen?

Management?

Why do you think those 300 people will work against their own interests?

[baldfat]

> But who is going to implement them?

Well the question is if you were the CEO. The CEO is going to have to roll up their sleeves and be the change maker. The environment will have to change. Staying the same is not an option in the long run.

> Why do you think those 300 people will work against their own interests?

When the company environment is one of empowering people to change themselves or help them move out of the way, because change is coming, allows current management a choice. Believing the best about people and that they also want the company to succeed and that deep down they also are frustrated by the low profits. That they actually just need someone to guide them to the promise land. I guarantee you that this management team is totally in paranoid "How are we still in business?" mode. If you can say, "We are turning this ship around and making this company survive through hard work and tough decisions will get people to leave or to actual apply themselves.

You have to change the work place environment and pretty much that will take care of the majority of the 300 people. The hardest thing to do is to change the workplace environment that really can only happen from the top down.

One thing about change, good or bad is that change is difficult. In environmental change at work it is unbearable for months and months. You keep meetings with fewer and fewer people and they will start looking for greener pastures and search and find these articles.

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-tips-for-deal...

If people are comfortable they will not look for new opportunities.

I guess I am saying that people don't take a self-assessment of their work till they are feeling left out or can't meet some challenges. Either way you have a better company from your management when they do. People will either flight or will challenge themselves, but staying the same is not an option.

[lifeformed]

Why do companies have to get so big? Does anyone value equilibrium? Let's say I make the perfect app that does exactly what it needs to do, and no more. It seems way more logical and appealing to keep things tight: just have a core team to maintain the product and company. No more features need to be added, it's already perfect.

What's the point of expanding? Would you even be making much more money per employee by growing huge? If I were the founder, I would much rather try to get the company stable, and have it become a passive income stream and have the time to make a new thing, instead of spending my life milking every last drop out of it until it becomes an irreparably bloated mess.

[social_quotient]

Typically it’s because these companies end up on “the juice” and owe investors some multiple and enough scale to get acquired.

They hire talent with the same growth mindset... not the sustainability mindset. They don’t tend to think, “what moves do I need to make to be around 100 years from now?”, they think “how can I get 20x growth in X time”. Unfortunately now they are thinking “how can I keep my job”.

[engineerman]

This is a good reason (hypergrowth), but there is another reason -- HR.

At most companies, tech or otherwise, it is hard to get more pay by doing a better job. You often cannot just get paid more for delivering faster, or delivering less buggy code, or closing more bugs than anyone else.

You get paid more for having a team. HR uses "# reports" as a metric for pay at almost every company i've been to. So I hire. I hire 3 when i need 1. I hire 5 when i need 2. Ideally, you end up doing no technical work and "managing up" the whole time. Recipe for success.

You set the metrics and i behave accordingly.

[philbarr]

For a start, you have a market because people are willing to wait in line for free furniture. Stop giving it away and clearly people will pay for it.

[bachmeier]

Great advice for the furniture business...worst possible advice for Evernote. Good luck using screenshots on a website to get someone to pay $8/month for Evernote. The only realistic way to convert someone into a paying customer (at such a high price point) is to get them to use the product heavily.

I would argue basically the opposite. If you're selling sofas at $4500 and your main competitors are giving them away, you're only going to sell to customers that really like your particular sofa. If you sell them at $500, and they're quite a bit better than the ones your competitors are giving away, you might be able to stay in business.

[ElBarto]

SaaS is good for some products but why would I pay a monthly subscription fee for taking notes?

[jjoonathan]

Because 6 groups in the company shared their notes with you but the free plan only covers 5.

[ltbarcly3]

This!

Burn the furniture pile (or move it into a warehouse or build a fence around it or something).

Hire a new COO who is the head salesman, and compensated purely by how much furniture they sell. Give them freedom to hire whoever they want so long as they are also being paid based on commission (and don't let them hire anybody already at the company).

As for the factory floor workers, optimize this later, sales is the focus so don't get distracted trying to optimize production until you forecast that it will fall behind sales. Get out and Sell! Get that furniture into stores.

Don't even fire the 300 people in the office, it's not worth the time you would put into it. Hire a consultant that specializes in downsizing to do it for you. Anyone who works in the office is considered contagious so no exceptions.

[megablast]

> Hire a new COO who is the head salesman, and compensated purely by how much furniture they sell. Give them freedom to hire whoever they want so long as they are also being paid based on commission (and don't let them hire anybody already at the company).

Oh, so magic the problem away?

And no one wants to work for your company on commission.

[ltbarcly3]

I guess you have never heard of a sales team before? Every sales team in the country works mainly on commission, and most executives have most of their compensation based on meeting performance metrics. So what are you even talking about?

[skuhn]

I think your comment lays out a lot of interesting parts of the realities and problems at this hypothetical company (which is pretty much everywhere I've ever worked to some degree). I don't think that these learnings are enough to actually achieve success though, if for no other reason than you have not defined what "success" looks like for this place. Not a criticism, but a place to start thinking from.

Before you can actually accomplish anything at this furniture company, I think a few other things have to happen:

1. Who has the power to fire you? The owner is the obvious answer, but maybe there are more people -- perhaps they are people who report to you. What do they want done? Can you get some political capital by executing on those things, even if they don't really matter?

You are coming into a dysfunctional place and at some level trying to make it functional. You will inevitably be subjected to backlash and are a candidate for host rejection, and you need tools to fight against that if you are going to succeed.

2. Find allies. This is a 500 person company, and you may be the boss but you can't be everywhere. People already inside the company could make great allies, but you have to worry about whether they are already too institutionalized or if there are political dynamics that you are unaware of. People from outside the company will be seen as outsiders, but may otherwise be more able to share your vision.

3. How long do you have to execute? The company is obviously burning a ton of money, so how much longer can that / will that be allowed to continue? You don't want to plan to use every second of that time, but knowing the order of magnitude (6 weeks, 6 months, 6 years) can be hugely helpful. Slow changes may be easier to roll out, but you most likely don't have 20 years to right the ship. If you don't have enough time to get to your end goal, then you need a new goal.

4. Is the product actually any good? What is the core institutional strength that you're working with? In this case, is the furniture actually made well? Is it made quickly? What do you have -- even if its a very small thing -- that gives you any kind of edge? Find a way to make that the core of your business.

5. What is the goal / what does success look like? This is the big one. You need to pick something (and get buy-in) and work towards that. Trying to fix everything about a company at once is doomed to failure. Trying to do twenty things and getting 10% on all of them is probably a waste of time. You need to be able to clearly articulate this for different audiences in different mediums in order to get the resources to execute on it. You may not be giving the same message to all groups.

In the case of the furniture company, I could see success as a few different things.

Option 1: Reduce burn and gradually spin down the business. This might sound like failure, but if you have no core strength and no way to get one, making the inevitable company collapse more gradual and graceful may be the best win you can get for yourself, the owner and the employees. If you had any customers, it would be helpful for them as well. This means figuring out who to cut in what order, what resources can be sold to return funds to the owner / other investors, and so on.

Option 2: Divide the business into the working and non-working parts, in order to contain and eventually excise the diseased parts. If the existing operating constraints and burdens are too great, you may need to give up on parts of the business.

Find teams or individuals who seem to execute well (if there are any) and quietly move them to work together on something that can be made, sold, marketed and shipped isolated from the teams that can't handle those tasks. You might need to outsource large parts of this vertical, or maybe even every part of it. Eventually you separate the businesses throughout a spinoff or an acquisition, unless you get the right signals and proceed to Option 3 instead. This is a way to succeed now without having to also pay off all of the debts of the past however many years (which you leave with the old business).

Option 3: Actually fix the entire business. You have all of that furniture piled up that people are taking for free, so that could mean that people will pay for what you make if only you sold or marketed it effectively.

This could also be a false signal. People will take things for free that they wouldn't be willing to pay for -- you have polluted your potential market by devaluing your product -- and you may not be able to overcome that. You also have the twin problems of the humongous historical costs and current operating overhead to produce product at this level. You will have to greatly increase your ACV or profit margins in order to not only pay for today's operating costs but to eventually cover all of the costs of getting to this point.

This option seems to be what Evernote has tried to do, by moving up-market into more enterprise-y things like team chat. I think that path is hopeless for them, and they will never achieve success that way. It might be too late, but they should probably try to get to a different successful outcome.

[camelite]

This is great. Not wanting to get too fanboyish, but neverthless, do you have a blog or somesuch?

[bpizzi]

To stick to this comment only:

> How do you fix this company?

I'll take a shot : you don't, the free market does it for you (ie. the company isn't going to last long, or the plant get shut down if part of a group). It's the VC/Angels money that allows such theoretical stories to be actually applied to startups.

[ardy42]

>> Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. > People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.

>> How do you fix this company?

> I'll take a shot : you don't, the free market does it for you (ie. the company isn't going to last long, or the plant get shut down if part of a group).

That's a pretty lazy, ideological answer. They're giving away their product for free and there's no mention of a sales team in the whole story. Before you get all enthused with "creative destruction," someone could try laying off some of the useless employees and actually selling their product first. Destruction shouldn't be the first solution, it should be the last.

[bpizzi]

No, it's neither a lazy nor ideological answer. It's a very pragmatic answer.

If you're the head of a plant where nothing produced is sold for a price that cover your expanses, then no, sorry, the system [0] will soon have your company closed down, depending on your amount of emergency cash. And if you're part of a group then you are in for a very rough time with the group's C[E/O/F]Os, and odds are that this will ends up with the plant being shut down (machines/peoples may be rebased at other plants).

> Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.

This is something that can't realistically happen for a furniture plant. You can't pile up furniture up to the sky without paying your wood suppliers.

[0] suppliers, banks, state - what I maybe shouldn't have called "free market" in order to avoid epidermic reactions

[isoskeles]

If someone asks you to fix something (or to do anything for that matter), and you are playing their game, then you should try in good faith.

It seems like you are saying you'd give up because it's pointless anyway. Maybe it is pointless (maybe Evernote has too much debt they can never repay), but if someone were paying you to fix a problem in this hypothetical scenario, giving up shouldn't be an acceptable response.

[justin_vanw]

> This is something that can't realistically happen for a furniture plant. You can't pile up furniture up to the sky without paying your wood suppliers.

Have you ever seen $300MM worth of wood? I specifically said the owner had pumped a huge amount of money in the company.

[oblio]

Not related to startups, but: the free market's distorted. Google, Apple, Facebook & co. are quite competitive today.

But they are also sitting on war-chests worth multiples of their yearly incomes (or at least a big chunk of 1 yearly income) and they are close to monopolies in some of their markets.

Even if they'd break down this badly, they'd be around for decades. Heck, IBM is still around :)

[bpizzi]

GAFA's are somewhat specials. I was very precisely answering to a very well written story about a plant producing furniture.

As a matter of fact, if you were Ikea's CEO with a rather important war-chest (however not at the level of Apple assuredly), you would never let "live" one of your plant if all it's finished goods were given for free because nobody would want to buy it.

[jjoonathan]

Excellent metaphor! Saved. To my evernote. That I don't pay for.

[DocTomoe]

> ux

Well, at least these guys have been diametral to Evernote's effectivity for me. I used to use the app daily as a paying customer - after the "everything needs to be white or a very light shade of grey" update, I hardly do anymore - it's just too exhausting and confusing to operate.

I have not yet pulled the plug on my subscription - but most likely will once a serious contender with OCR comes around.

[reilly3000]

This is particularly relevant from my particular perspective. Maybe you could call me a trans worker- I have pretty successfully transitioned from a full-time marketing and sales person to a mostly developer, partially product person over the past several years. I really love and hate both sides of the work, but I'm glad to have walked in so many shoes. There is rigor that marketers and sales folks face that most engineers would not succeed at. Despite the fact that you only see them in meetings, they do a remarkable amount of work to make things not go off the rails, and most of it is invisible. Sales heavy firms do tend to close first, engineer later, and that generally results in terrible deliverables. Conversely, engineering heavy firms are notorious for delivering products that feature everything and deliver little to no (perceived, ie actual) value.

My assertion is that it truly takes all kinds. I find it remarkable that Evernote can serve 225M people with 500. I think that the people who give effort to find the genius in every department themselves become enlightened.

[village-idiot]

Product people are important, I don’t think Op was saying otherwise. But it’s typically more labor intensive to actually implement the ideas that product has, so in a healthy org you would expect to see more engineers than product people to ensure that everything is close to in balance.

[shady-lady]

> marketers come up with the copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing and more

Most of these are done by a) outside agencies or if they're big enough b) in house design staff or c) templates

[shady-lady]

To give a concrete example of what marketing staff "do".

When facebook & "viral" was mainstream, our marketing staff decided they wanted to make something go viral. It was an image with the word 'SALE' (90% of image area) & our company logo (10% of image area).

Company wide email: "blahblah blah..Let's make this go viral!!"

It was then that I realised job titles don't equate to talent or impact. Marketing is 90% admin and the 10% that is creative can be better handled by more creative people(frequently not in the marketing dept - engineers/designers)

[adarsh_thampy]

I am a product manager and I have been at both ends of the spectrum.

Case #1: Only product manager for the entire company. Spend all day trying to understand what's the most important thing to do for the current sprint. Comes out with nothing.

Case #2: One of the several product managers trying to find something to do to show to our boss.

Both doesn't end well.

[Null-Set]

Your math is off, 54 is 15% of 360, leaving 306 employees after the layoffs.

[ryanwaggoner]

500+ employees with an annual revenue estimated to be below $10MM.

The article said that the layoff letter claimed Q3 revenue was $27mm, or an order of magnitude higher than what you're claiming here.

[justin_vanw]

I guess it depends on your base, but if their revenue is about $100MM/yr (which I highly doubt, companies love to outright lie, but lets be optimistic) then it's still only about $200k/employee, and their employee costs are likely $300k-$400k/employee/year, if not more in their Redwood City headquarters.

[ryanwaggoner]

First, they now have about 300 employees. The “500+” number is just something you made up, just like you made up your $10mm revenue number.

Second, I’m highly skeptical that the CEO is making fraudulent financial claims in his letter to the employees. Unlike you, he: a) actually knows the facts, and b) is liable for his false statements.

Finally, it’s clear you have some kind of bizarre axe to grind against Evernote, hence the baseless speculation and outright lies over the years. No idea why, but it’s pretty sad.

You can respond if you want but I won’t be reading or replying.