Mezo
We’re a modern maintenance company that partners with operators and their staff to help residents better articulate their maintenance needs for faster resolutions. Our Intelligent IntakeTM platform makes one-trip resolution possible… or even no tr...
Mezo Employee Reviews
Featured review
Why I come to work happy
5/9/2022 -
VP Product
Recommends
Positive outlook
Approves of CEO
Pros
I’ve gotten older. I have young kids running around that want to wrestle at night with a monster that happens to look a lot like me covered in a blanket. One needs help with homework. The other needs help with Legos. I have pasta to cook. (That’s, like, all they eat.) And then on the weekends they expect me to be heavily involved in playing Roblox and going on walks to get cake pops. So why is my job review all about the time I spend with my kids? Mezo is a startup. I knew I wanted to be back in a startup environment after a long stint at a large company, owned by a very large company, owned by a mega company. The problem was I didn’t think I could pull it off. Startups are chaotic. You’re never sure if you’ll still be employed in a month. Priorities change before you’re even done writing them down. While work hours run from all-day until never-sleep. And I didn’t have that kind of time--I already had a job as a blanket monster. Yet here I am. And in spite of joining a startup, I haven’t given up making dinner for my kids. Helping with homework. Building with Legos. Or playing video games and going on walks. And I haven’t worried once about our future. Our team is 99% virtual and somehow it feels completely natural. I remember the first time I met everyone in person; it didn’t occur to me until an hour or so in that I’d never actually been in the same room as most anyone there. Yet I knew about their hobbies, their kids, their kids’ hobbies, their pets (currently mostly cats, but a few dogs). I’d even looked at their vacation photos--even though I wasn’t in any of them. These people smart and capable and motivated. But relaxed and very willing to help a non-engineer like myself understand how our code works. We’re big on documenting. Huge on ownership. Small on hierarchy. We sat down as a group to map out our SDLC, with different pieces of the process championed by different members of the team. But to be clear, it wasn’t on each person’s shoulders to come up with that portion. Rather it was their job to work with everyone else—gathering and structuring input, getting feedback and revising, etc.—to get to a point where we could, as a group, come to a consensus. That’s not to say there aren’t decisions made at certain levels. And whatever plan the team develops still needs to pass through feedback and review from those responsible for the team’s output. But even Executive feedback is still part of the group revision process. I’m going to rattle off a few more pros: 1. We care about data, and check our initial impressions and reactions against it. 2. We recognize data isn’t perfect. Especially early data. And we me double-check to make sure we aren’t forgetting unmeasured variables when we use data as a guide. 3. We’re product driven, focused on our users. 4. We’re developing an outcome-focused roadmap. It’s not about what feature is next. It’s about what we’d want our features to achieve. 5. We care about the people we work with. We want to protect their lives outside work AND inside. 6. I don’t feel qualified to say whether we’re doing a good job forming a diverse team. But I’m glad it’s a high priority. 7. We have fun.Cons
I’m not going to pretend everything’s perfect. We’ve had our share of issues. And we still do. More importantly though, I’m happy about the way we handle them. Have I worked late nights and weekends? Of course. For a while our workload was an issue. And on top of after-hours work, our releases ran behind. It was frustrating for everybody. And when I talked with the CEO about it, the primary strategy we came up with was to cut down the work. He wanted us to focus our time on fewer deliverables in a sprint. That was a very refreshing meeting. Since then we’ve still had occasional hiccups with later nights. But we discuss the events and figure out how to keep them from happening in the future. I’d say most of our issues center around our still early-stage structure. I’ll switch to a list again: 1. We’re still getting our ticketing system organized. 2. New staffing situations and technical integrations unveil surprise hurdles we need to scramble for. 3. Too many Slack channels! I’m pretty sure they self-replicate. 4. We’re growing fast and it can be a challenge to balance focus between long- and short-term needs. 5. More meetings than we’d likeMezo Awards & Accolades
Chicago Innovation Awards - 2023 50 on Fire, Chicago Inno, 2023 BuiltWorld's Building Tech 50 List, BuiltWorld's, 2023
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