I would highly discourage folks from working in the Professional Services group. If you have more technical acumen, I would encourage you to go for roles in Sales Engineering or Product Management. I entirely regret not going for the Sales Engineer role while I had the chance...
I found in Professional Services, outside of a few all-stars that have been at Fusion for a long time, the group as a whole offers a pretty horrible work experience. Initially, they are entirely comfortable hiring and retaining Implementation Consultants who join with zero Salesforce skills. I had no Salesforce experience prior to joining but had to quickly learn these config skills on my own time because my projects were staffed with implementation consultants with no SF experience (granted I was told I didn't need SF skills for my specific role). I have a few former colleagues in mind that really skated by not participating in projects but charged enough clients hours to look productive which frustrated productive team members.
Further, the group is very bloated from a managerial standpoint. The managers they recently hired in 2023 are more focused on status reporting and are largely unable to offer you any practical assistance for day-to-day issues. I wasn't entirely sure how they were driving any value to me and my implementation teams I used to lead. There are 3-4 different managers for Financial Services clients alone and their only relevant qualifications appear to being at a FS company prior . They did not know the BC/DR/Op Res space at all nor did they have much product information. So when they try and determine your success on a project, they really don't understand what's going on and just listened to PMs. These managers I'm referring to that are in-charge of hiring, promotions, etc. were never able to hold their own in-front of clients. They were largely silent parties that rarely could add value so that was by far the worst experience I've had with a manager even coming from Public Accounting. I was also unable to switch managers after telling my manager I didn't think she should be my coach anymore. Ultimately they told me I was going on a 'performance improvement plan' after PMs I worked with provided feedback, but ultimately I never got a plan and they went straight to firing.
One funny line a founder told me was "I've yet to see a smooth implementation project". At the time a lot of folks agreed as it seemed it was just a job where you were putting out fires constantly and having to figure out custom solutions on your own. I just know that I grew extremely frustrated being managed by someone who I only spoke to a couple minutes a week if I was lucky and could not be useful on an engagement. Those are the folks determining your success so tread very carefully. Ultimately they also favor Project manager / engagement managers WAY too much. From my experience we never needed them on the project. They were really just glorified notetakers/emailers on my project teams and also rarely knew what was going on from a product perspective as well. In my experience, in the aim of trying to feel more important than their role actually was on a project, these PMs would overshare and overreport with management leading to loads of misunderstandings, wasted time, and worthless bureaucratic annoyances.
