I joined ATG through their acquisition of LiveAuctioneers, where I worked as a Group Product Manager. The acquisition robbed LiveAuctioneers of everything that made it a magical place to work—a culture of collaborative product prioritization, genuine customer focus, and respect for employees. What ATG became was a place of repeated re-orgs and layoffs, top-down command-and-control prioritization driven by opinionated executives' past company experiences, and general rudeness from leadership.
Collaborative decision-making between product, design, engineering, and stakeholders was dismantled through bureaucracy and executive overreach. Projects previously defined collaboratively became subject to constant re-prioritization due to executive in-fighting. VP and C-suite executives bickered over small features while teams dealt with whiplash from projects being dropped and re-prioritized multiple times. This majorly reduced velocity and wore many down.
The leadership culture was toxic. Command-and-control replaced collaboration, where missing goals led to anger and painting a target on your back rather than problem-solving. One confrontational non-Product/Design/Engineering executive regularly grilled rank-and-file designers' work. I witnessed a tech leader call someone an "idiot," another executive angrily scold a PM to "think of better ideas," and altercations that made colleagues cry. For many, people started to work from fear rather than motivation.
Between 2021 and 2024, there were at least two major reorganizations attempting to cobble acquired companies into global teams. Layoffs were communicated swiftly--mass HR termination calls followed by all-hands reassurance meetings. This pattern repeated multiple times, creating a culture where good people were laid off faster than they could leave voluntarily.
Customer experience became secondary to executive opinions and market optics. Arbitrary deadlines forced rollout of features that weren't ready to scale, driven by the need to "show value" to the market. Complaints from our auctioneer community continue to this day.
In February 2024, I was laid off with designers, marketers, PMs, my VP Product, and our CPO (who "retired" prior). They eliminated most of the buyer-side product team. After years of service, I got slightly larger severance.
ATG will likely never achieve its vision, and their brands are increasingly tarnished in target markets. The destruction of what made LiveAuctioneers special shows how poor leadership destroys good culture and talented teams.
