High caliber VP of Operations - Anonymous employee Sea-Bird Scientific Employee Review

Leadership is taking on headwinds with transparency and passion. Times are challenging but I believe they will get us through headwinds to a great 2026!

I control my destiny and feel empowered to make a difference here.

Good products, good mission, good people. There are many, many passionate people with customer interests first in mind. The products are amazingly capable and they do really strive to understand customer needs and fulfill them.

I recently felt I had to leave and when I reflected on why - it mostly boiled down to leadership. Which was very sad - because I think this was the best job I've ever had and a great company with some wonderful contributors. The leadership - particularly in manufacturing and service - is incredibly poor and distant from what is really happening in their business. They are fundamentally disinterested in the "nuts and bolts" of how an operations organization works - fundamental problems with inventory management, product management and data management underpin massive problems that impact customers daily..... They know this, but they don't care - or aren't capable? - of understanding them to the level of detail it takes to fix them. They are satisfied being distant from the details and think "engagement" is showing up to the holiday party and being friendly. They are obsessed with numbers and metrics and believe managing those is "leadership" - but that distance means they don't understand the processes that generate them and thus what they really mean. The VP operations is downright hostile to doing anything but what the "Veralto Enterprise System" prescribes and thus doesn't understand his manufacturing or service systems and how to use them to fundamentally manage inventory, orders, build schedules, engineering changes or his entire supply chain. Other leaders under the VP have been promoted to their roles in this environment and also lack fundamental understandings of how to manage operations and data. It had become dysfunctional and with some of their current persistent problems, along with some of the future things coming at this business - I feared being thrown under a bus because of this lack of understanding and engagement.