INDIAMART - How is the company and product leadership?

1. Arrogant, out-of-touch product leadership: Critical journeys like Discovery-Search, Product Recommendations, and Lead Approval are controlled by a few long-tenured leaders who operate with a “only we know best” mindset. There is strong arrogance and very little openness to feedback or real user validation. Several senior leaders appear to have grown only within this system for years, lack exposure to modern product orgs, and rely on positional power rather than strong product judgment.

In reality, many of these flows are over-engineered, cognitively heavy, and poorly validated with users. Decisions are often based on assumptions, hearsay, or buzzwords, not structured research or prioritization. Vision and roadmap clarity are weak, and product thinking rarely goes beyond surface-level hypotheses.

2)Lack of standard practices: IndiaMART is fundamentally a sales-led organization, not a product-led one. APM/PM roles largely function as project managers executing top-down mandates rather than owning problem discovery, strategy, or user-centric decision-making. Standard product practices (user research, experimentation, agile maturity) are mostly absent.

3. Stable Products, Lack of New tech-adoption & diversification: Most products are mature and stagnant. Work is limited to incremental enhancements and support. Very few get to work on something new. There is little appetite for innovation or diversification beyond the legacy lead-matching model. No focus on improving significant user-journeys like search relevancy, logistics, payment, post-purchase...are completely missing.

4. Random Hiring & Firing Policy: Every year in April, the company heavily hires fresh graduates (cheap, more work, often submissive) with limited role-fitment checks, onboarding, or structured upskilling. Employees are frequently assigned vague,complex or critical projects without adequate training or context, and expected to show results within 3–6 months. (You might be given to lead the core-ML project, regardless of your data-science knowledge/interest/experience). Performance evaluation is highly SUBJECTIVE. Every appraisal cycle in December, 10% employees, 20+ employees are abruptly exited (LAYOFF) without any formal warnings & severance support, followed by 20+ fresh campus grads hiring the next year April — creating a recurring hire and fire cycle leading to bad culture and high attrition.

5. Toxic & Insecure managers: Many managers have spent long tenures within this system and have limited external exposure. This often results in: insecurity, indecisiveness, micro-management, lack of coaching mindset, strong “yes-man” behavior toward senior leadership. Accountability flows downward. When things go wrong, blame is often pushed to APMs/PMs rather than being owned at leadership levels. Psychological safety is low, and risk-taking is discouraged.

6. Mature business under pressure: The core seller-subscription business has shown stagnation in recent years ~2.2 Lacs (since 2022). Buyer intent quality is weak, but leads are aggressively monetized. Thus, seller as well as buyer retention goes for a toss. This results in extreme pressure on product and sales teams to deliver short-term KPIs rather than long-term user value.

7. Lack of employee-centric policies: -Strict 9-hour punch IN-punch OUT -No parking facilities (pay from your pocket) and no travel allowances (even for official work). No cab facilities. -No consistent learning, skill-development, or team-bonding initiatives -No uniform HR policies even within same department & same levels, ie, for two product managers under the same department, the policy can be different : 3 to 5 working days / WFH limits / Leave flexibility can be different & completely depends on your terms with your manager & HOD.

IndiaMART may work for those seeking short-term execution exposure in a sales-led environment. However, for experienced professionals, this may not be the right fit.

Any insights will be really helpful