Being sold or outright folding - Product Manager Cengage Employee Review

1.0
Feb 16, 2017
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Some really great people. Most of them are now gone.

Cons

Product Managers work for the finance department. No real product development work goes on. Employees have grown so accustomed to layoffs or smart people resigning that they no longer acknowledge the existence of past employees. It is an Orwellian nightmare at its finest. Managers are yes-men/women who retaliate against employees who question the system. Many managers push out great employees by making them miserable so that they quit to avoid layoffs with severance. A prominent leader has recently stepped down and employees are hoping this will change the miserable culture, but by now so much is systemic with legacy cronies still in their position...the outlook for culture improvement is bleak. MindTap is destroying Cengage.

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3.0
Jun 4, 2026
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Company has some interesting approaches to the market and in the past they seemed value employees. There are some good employees there and there was, in the past, visionary leadership, but the people with the vision and leadership skills left the company a few years ago.

Cons

The company actively de-values employees. They had a project they called "Project Horizon" where they told all employees they needed to cut costs, so the company was going to have multiple layoffs over 3-5 years - but nobody was allowed to know when, where, or why - - just one day large swaths of people would be gone. That hung over everyone's heads - for years, and is indicative of how Cengage values employees - it doesn't. Everything is about trying to secure new funding and prepare for an IPO, so they stopped investing significantly in the products about 3 years ago and that's about when they stopped acting like they cared about employee wellness as well.

10
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