In the years I worked at eSpark, the quality of the products steadily declined, as did the company culture. Without anyone with education experience on eSpark’s leadership team, it seemed the team was shooting in the dark at what school districts and teachers “need,” to no avail. Each product iteration flopped worse than the last, leading to diminishing sales and at times, begging teachers and districts to use the products free of charge. With hundreds of negative user reviews, the product team would focus only on one positive teacher review, rather than addressing the fact that the vast majority of users were unhappy and not seeing the results they were promised. Even in the midst of multiple rounds of company layoffs (due to falling drastically short of revenue goals), the leadership team touted that things were better than ever. This level of dishonesty made for toxic culture around the office, with such a major disconnect between the reality and what the leadership team wanted to convey. The reality was that school districts were dropping the products at high rates, and sales were nearly nonexistent. There has been increasingly heavy turnover in the last year as team members from across the company try to jump off of a sinking ship.
