Zillow reviews

It's operated like a startup, even though the size of the engineering team, even post-layoff, makes that tricky; the management directive to adopt "agile" methods without any move to any particular agile methodology in mind was, in most teams, mostly taken as justification to do no planning.

Restructuring the company to better handle a global slow down in advertisement markets, Zillow recently went through a reduction in force (RIF). This sudden and drastic change greatly affects the company makeup, it's culture, and it unavoidably drains the company of senior talent and "tribal" knowledge. Rapid development and execution of ideas were largely a result of throwing lots of resources at a problem. Rather than rely on the product development team to quickly innovate and then refine an idea, execution of a plan was often bogged down quibling over minor details. Almost making the argument for the RIF, a smaller team with less oversight could deliver a similar, if not quite as polished product, in less time.