- Personio has grown to impressive revenue levels and that's achievement can't be taken away but at the end of the day it's a German business that can't figure out how to grow beyond the region. Have fallen asleep at the wheel last 2 years now allowing competition to come in and effectively close off markets for future growth. The product is good but not good enough and has had no innovation beyond a nice redesign. Have wasted mountains of cash propping up a top heavy product and engineering org to look like a big tech company rather than focusing on good talent who can actually do the work and ship stuff. Payroll has potential but fear it's a sunk cost fallacy at this point.
- Lack of focus, constantly shifting priorities. Nothing ever gets finished, stopped or paused because new fires emerge. This is normal in a scaleup but in most places you make trade offs. At Personio it's all things all the time meaning below average execution. Strategies sound great and look great on paper but have too many elements and assume the basics are in place like great data, systems etc - they are not!
- Bad decision making tops down and then blaming lower levels for mistakes despite been warned of risks and then back tracking to try and fix gaps leading to unnecessary work. Listen to the people you hire, you hired them for a reason. Related to this the root causes of problems are ignored and often the solution is to layoff and fire (secretly or otherwise) and believe that a magical new leader will solve all the problems but those leaders rarely make progress for long because they aren't able to address the foundational issues.
- While I genuinely believe the C level tries to be transparent and invests a lot in comms they just miss the mark and always come off as overly positive while sugarcoating things and hiding or glossing over numbers. The team are not dumb and see though it and it loses trust. Company needs a new north star and vision and someone who can inspire and be genuine.
- Only my personal opinion but Personio is a prime candidate for acquisition at best and PE takeover at worst so be aware of this if joining and don't put too much weight into equity.
