The product org is the biggest joke I've seen in my entire career. Everything has OKRs and KPIs, none of them match the current company direction. If you don't hit these numbers, nothing will happen: no accountability whatsoever. Several initatives even go into the opposite direction of their KPIs, but if you think that stops anybody from continuing them - you're wrong, some people even get a promotion for that performance. As a result everybody just does the bare minimum of changing colors, merging buttons, adding icons or somehow changing layouts that a poor UX person can put it on their CV for their upwork profile. Nobody, starting from the CEO and the CPO has a clue what to do with the product. One day we want to do multi-banking and multi-accounting, the other day trading and savings, tomorrow crypto and insurances. In the end we just want to play catch-up with Revolut, which we are behind half a decade in feature development. We have the highest product to tech people ratio in the industry, yet nothing they can come up with is in the slightest sense innovative or ground breakingly unique as a differentiator. Even the app from Sparkasse has more features than N26 and delivers more per quarter. If you look at the background of our product people, several of them actually come from customer service from some kind of career progression path. Because chatting with people over a coffee is really all qualification you need for you to do product management here. The result is that they make the funniest and most ridiculous decisions - mostly driven by the product director bros that have not the slightest clue of what it takes to be a director but always give you a cool bro excuse on why the don't do the thing that makes the most sense. A common excuse PMs bring is that they are being micro managed by Valentin, especially here on glassdoor, but the reality is that they just really suck as product managers. Frequently you find PMs going to conferences to talk about the bleeding edge sh*t they don't do at work in order for them to secure their next gig at some other startup.
Compliance is a total joke department, the first thing they introduce is waterfall software development so some banking operation dude with no technical background (probably originating from customer service) can micro-manage every line of code that's being released to production. Apparently it reduces risk when you can't ship anything anymore. Instead of fixing real compliance issues, they focus on writing 40 page processes that nobody can ever adhere to, implement or inspect.
Security is a total cr*p show, the best security people they have are some kids with an AWS certification on how to define a VPC with security groups and due to that are super arrogant. Similar to Compliance they want to review code and "security test" every little piece of code MANUALLY before it goes into production (yes, you have to wait three weeks for them to look at it, plus another to test before you can release). The best they can find is that your JSON parser throws exceptions when it's getting malformed input - thanks for wasting everybodies time without any added security to the product.
AML (the department that should fight fraudsters and money laundering and such) is a lead by a recent grad that apparently wrote a couple of sentences in his master thesis about it.
Feedback culture is, after the PM org, the second biggest joke here. Everybody needs to constantly gather feedback from random people to improve themselves or get a promotion. In reality, you obviously ask your best friends to give you good feedback and then half of the company spends at least six weeks in calibration sessions, reading out loud what your friend has given you for a feedback and how that compares to that other dude that got feedback from his friends. Then in some elusive round of important people, they decide based on your name and your friends feedback whether to give you nothing, a 0.5% raise or a promotion with no salary increase ("acting" they call it). To top if off, there are constantly engagement surveys going around to make sure everybody is happy. If you wonder whether there is any change coming out of these surveys? Nope. They completely stopped after the last time, where they gave away free chocolate during Christmas to show that they care about you as an employee. Instead every team now has to come up with a set of actions on how to improve things. As you can imagine, the number one complaint is that our C level completely sucks - which obviously doesn't get fixed - as well as the other things you complain about. Feedback culture at N26 is completely broken and a waste of everybodies time.
If you read other reviews, maybe you have read about Kurzarbeit (furlough). Effectively it was a huge layoff program of several hundred people. Anyone sent off was already circulating in low performer lists for a couple of weeks before the decision was made official. The crisis was apparently the right time and trigger to scam the German social security fund for some social security money to send these people off for an infinite vacation. If you read it while you're on KA, you are definitely not coming back ever: find a new job ASAP. Fret not, all the money we're saving and raising due to that is spent every month in a six digit marketing budget, excluding the enormous salary that the new Marketing Director from Uber gets from doing nothing all day.
Since the crisis all hiring is frozen, yet people leave in masses. There is not a single week going by without a "goodbye" email. This happens in waves, so every year you can count on the full company to completely replace itself: you rarely find anyone working here for longer than a couple of months. The obvious result is that we have to promote inexperienced people into roles they are no fit for, again causing more people to leave. On top of the usual half-a-year re-org attempt to fix the broken matrix organization, we constantly have to merge teams to keep them somehow functional. Oh right, if you think that would cut the workload somehow, reprioritize initiatives or extend the timeline expectations? Not at all, Valentin will personally blame you and your team for not delivering.
Due to that chaos, it's absolutely impossible to do changes that are bigger than changing the color of a button or a adding some logos. All big projects (which for granted have great project managers) fail or get cancelled half-way through because nobody is capable to deliver them. Everybody involved in the process feels entitled enough to say "no" to anything, starting from PMs that see their OKRs at risk, armchair architects whose sole education comes from Martin Fowler blogs (no wonder, half of the company is actually working at Thoughtworks or worked there in the past), low-light tech leads that don't want to do additional work and then the usual compliance and security people that want you to not change a single thing ever. The bias for inaction really sucks the lifeblood out of everybody and makes people refrain from doing anything that improves things.
Working from home is a constant topic that comes back up every week and in every Q&A session. Apparently everybody becomes more innovative when they sit together in meetings instead of using Hangouts, at least that's the latest narrative that Valentin and Max want you to believe. I'm always wondering how they have so much time to micromanage everybody back into the office when they could also tackle real problems of their company. Looking at the recent history before everybody had to work from home, I have a hard time to understand how anybody at this company is innovative in the slightest sense. In the past, this caused the whole building to be out of meeting rooms all the time.
To top if off, they were so concerned about the health and safety that they filed restraining orders against their own employees (!) to make sure they can't vote for an electoral board of a works council. The whole communication and reasoning around it is beyond doubt the most ridiculous narrative I've seen in my entire life. Thankfully the press covered it properly, so stay away from such a company and I can only hope that everybody working here is leaving as soon as possible.
