Long story short, it's completely over-engineered by a bunch of intellectual engineers with no focus, no discipline, and no oversight. It ended up not delivering on any promises it made, and there were a lot of them.
I was warned left and right before presentations and meetings, "this customer hates your product because of ...." I started off every meeting with saying, "we're rearchitecting the product, this is how we're doing it, this is the tech we are using." Immediately there was a sense of relief from customers, followed by questions like, "why can't <current product> deliver <feature> that was promised?" I'm completely honest with bad decisions that were made and how it impacted the feature. Sure, there is skepticism on what we are doing, and I tell them they should absolutely be skeptical based on our track record. The result has been customers who have hated my product now offering to work with us on development.
I've also been completely forthcoming on configuration, security, resources, and setup issues I am finding, many of them are absolutely freakin' insane. I've flat out told customers it's frankly embarrassing and never let us do something like this in the future. The best feedback on this was, "At least you're telling us something. We usually get silence from this team."
God, this is the most depressing job ever.
I'm curious what you'd like to do next. You could probably have a great career doing these sorts of turnarounds repeatedly across companies, maybe even as a consultant, but would you want to?
It's hinted by the C-level that if I can pull this off, it would be nothing short of a miracle. I'm pretty sure I can negotiate salary, education, bonus, and what not if I can pull this off.
As far as next, I've thought about that. It would be funny to call myself a turnaround specialist. This would be quite a remarkable feat, but I really don't know if I would have taken this job if I knew what a mess this was...
Do this up front. Do it as soon as you possibly can. You will lose a huge amount of negotiating leverage if you "wait until you show them". I cannot stress this enough.
I am not sure how much you could negotiate but you can have something like that and being metric based. X% customers happy, x% rating change, x% customers retained when they were close to leave. Then you make the math of the revenue and profit and it’s hard to say no.