Not a great place for research and design - Product Manager N26 Employee Review

It’s concerning for us to hear that you don’t feel your work is being valued at N26. We will take this opportunity to respond to your concerns, and in addition we have shared your feedback with our leadership team for further reflection and action. Design and research are essential to our product and business. Not only in specific roles, but also in the mindset and attitude of everyone involved. We believe that curiosity, coupled with a data driven application, are core to making good product decisions. We see research as a dynamic, ongoing process that continues long after a product launch. This can range from an early discovery phase, case studies on consumer behaviour, experimentation, or post launch behaviour understanding - all of which are critical to business decisions. With COVID-19, business criticality was the number one priority when looking at work and roles to prioritise. As a financial institution, we needed to ensure that we didn't compromise the banking and stability side of the business, and this did mean that some roles were more impacted than others. While this is of course not an ideal situation to be in, we have been able to leverage short-time work programs, such as Kurzarbeit in Germany, to ensure we can continue to offer employment for all our fantastic people, while at the same time ensuring business continuity. There are no plans to change or remove the €1,500 personal development budget. This remains a great resource for our people to put towards activities and materials supporting their professional development within N26. We encourage employees of all levels to build up their personal brands, and to amplify externally the great achievements from their work and learnings at N26. We want to positively impact the career journeys of our employees, and leveraging things like networking and panel discussions can be an important stepping stone along the way. We are absolutely supportive of this, and our Employer Branding team is available to offer additional coaching and support in this area. We also put an incredible amount of effort and intention behind our leadership development programs. All People Managers at N26 have access to programs which focus on our people management frameworks, processes, tools and practices, to ensure that you as an employee receives the right level of care and guidance during your professional journey with us. If you are open to keeping this conversation going, the Employee Experience Partner assigned to your area would be a good next step for this dialogue. Details of this team and their responsible areas are shared on the company intranet. Thank you for speaking up and sharing your experience.