An obsession with measurement leads to missing the bigger point all too often and driving perverse incentives as well as a silo'd, unhelpful org structure. A few examples - a product team wants to experiment with a promising new feature, and suspects it would drive more user engagement. But if that metric has not been previously identified as important or is difficult for someone in sr management to understand, then either the project will get killed or won't be applauded. Meanwhile a minor turn of the screw on a revenue-generating feature will require an all-hands on deck effort ironically without any holistic analysis of the ROI of that effort. In other words, hooray that we raised revenue on that feature by .5% but at what cost (direct cost and opportunity cost)? No one knows, because no one measured it. Further, you have sales or BD teams feverishly optimizing around their singular metric and potentially squandering a customer or partner opportunity for a value trade that is sub-optimal. If teams had better alignment and communication, TA could figure out the best first home for a customer and partner and work out the most logical order to grow that customer and mutual value. Sr management rarely cares about nor addresses this conflicts, it takes a few employees who care about the bigger picture - at direct personal cost to their own short-term success - to effectively do the right thing.
Lots of hiring but without any evident positive effect on the process and products. One eng group has grown 2-3x over the past year, and the release process is totally chaotic and broken. Honestly things worked better when we had a few great engineers vs this mess of people all stepping on each other.
The company constantly says that it is metrics-driven and a meritocracy, but when a team or an individual delivers on and *exceeds* stated goals (in some instances by 50%-300%), there is still unbelievably wide latitude given to management with annual reviews, awarding bonuses, and advancing employees -- coupled with the most opaque system I have ever witnessed. Zero transparency on the review, comp and bonus process. People should not be shocked during their annual reviews, especially when they over-deliver; they should be thanked and properly compensated. And - it should go without saying - employees should have expectations properly set by managers well ahead of the annual review. Much more training is needed here, and it needs to be pushed aggressively as a cultural norm to have open and host feedback with regularity.
Majority of the focus in on a few small teams to eke out teeny tiny improvements to optimize revenue
The weekly reports and product reviews talk about +.3% wins and similar micro-steps, which on the one hand makes sense for this relatively mature company, but also is about as dull as dirt in terms of interesting projects for smart people to work on longer term career objectives
Promotions are virtually nonexistent, but the company is happy to ask already-busy people to take on additional roles during times of turn over.
A lack of interest in retention has led to high turnover by really talented people up and down the seniority spectrum.
There has not been a head of HR in well over a year, which speaks volumes about where the priorities and values rest.
Lack of any organized effort to integrate acquisitions - teams, products, assets, etc.
New opportunities (revenue, tech, partner) have no logical evaluation process or home / team. You could take a promising oppty to 3 different teams without any commitment or next steps from them. As a result, Trip misses out all of the time on being early to market in new areas and then turns around and blames people internally for not being part of the "cool new thing." Also very US-centric sr mgmt team POV. If they have heard of the company or technology personally, then they (sometimes) rally behind it, but if it's huge in a foreign market, good luck getting anyone's attention until it's way too late to structure a substantive agreement.
