Booking.com reviews

In the U.S. there is a new structure in place where Account Managers have to be out of the office every other week with every Friday as an in office day to have all day long meetings. So, what does that mean? I'm already in this constant state of being stressed out from having to schedule 20 meetings with clients in a week (M-TH), have team meeting and office meetings on Friday, having to follow up from those client meetings, while then having to start all over and schedule meetings again for the next week out. Then, throw in the added work of doing pricing all day long when you are in the office (and being told that you can't do anything else, even though you still have responsibility to partners to fix their escalated customer service issues, and respond to any other inquiries they may send you). All in the meanwhile, targets and focus seem to change from week to week, or even from day to day! Senior Account Managers offer little to no support and are being told from upper management to micro-manage the heck out of us. EVERYTHING IS TRACKED now, and even though they keep saying "oh, we are not tracking you" THEY ARE and they just won't admit it. There are invisible quotas. I still haven't figured out why. I think upper management now has this general distrust of the AM team, when I know full well all of us (at least in my office) are sharp and very skilled at what we do and we all have good relationships with our partners. Back to the travel schedule - trying to prepare, schedule and meet 5 partner visits a day, 4 days a week is just draining. By Wednesday I am so tired from talking to people, thinking about what I am going to say to them, showing them the reports, and then actioning and doing follow up that I just want to fall into a blackhole and disappear. It's exhausting and I don't know how long I will last like this. I really really hate this. Last, the bonus and how things are calculated - I think they must be consulting with the government's education department because it's like common core math for business. Here's an idea: give us individual targets based in reality and then we won't be left to guess where we stand in reaching whatever % of our salary to be paid as bonus. In summary, the AM team is underpaid, overstressed, and demoralized to the fact that we are being micro-managed to the point of mistrust, when there is no reason to mistrust. It is very sad, because when I first started a couple years ago it was not like this. I like my office, my co-workers, the benefits and my hotel partners. This egg might crack soon.

The company is on a moment many people in the product/tech organisation are demotivated by the focus on short-term wins that no one is sure are actually wins. The experimentation methodology Booking is famous for doesn't follow best practices and there’s little training to understand how to be data-driven. There’s a lack of leadership and strategy in middle and upper management (CEO included), which in turn got promoted because they continued this culture. As a Product Owner, you have little contact with upper management (CPO, SVPs, Directors), and unclear guidance on strategy. More than once you would hear different opinions from CPO, Senior Directors and Directors about important topics, vision of the company etc. When the company says it's data-driven, it really is, to the point that most decisions can be deferred to A/B testing. Most people have a simplified knowledge about how to do experimentation and middle management knows this but very little has changed. This creates a culture of superficial thinking about the customer and no deep understanding of customer issues. If you try to work on big or bold ideas, you’ll be told to break this down into smaller steps and find a way to validate it. On a career level, there's little to no clarity on promotions and yearly bonuses, but there’s a clear political and favoritism bias. Performance reviews (every 3 months) are based on feedback given on an internal tool and that are "calibrated" with others that also do the same thing. This can be gamed by asking feedback from people that like you and by "selling" your work more than actually bringing results. If you challenge the feedback you get from your manager you'll be retaliated in subtle ways. Specifically for Product Owner, the only career path is to become a Senior Product Owner and become a people manager. If you don’t like that or you don’t have the traits of a people manager, you’ll stay in the PO role for a really long time. Technical or design excellence are a second and third class citizens. There's little investment to improve the quality of how things are done and there's no support to create new technologies or go open-source. The same applies for design, and the result as a product you can see for yourself.