The product area in the business is completely broken. I can see that most people in that area of product are unhappy and stressed out, whether you are a UX Designer, Insight Analyst or Product Owner. This is mostly down to the constant crunch management style. If you are currently the one in focus you very much feel it. We never really celebrate success and as soon as we have a win, its straight onto the next fire we have to put out.
Pointless meetings that have mandatory attendance - our community is massive now and they are often a waste of time.
Conflicting targets and priorities, engineering might have some goals one quarter and product might have another. This not only causes internal conflict within the product teams themselves but conflict between teams. Its very hard to collaborate and push the BookingGo strategy when there is so much conflict in goals. Whilst i have a great relationship with my colleagues in my product team, as a community its becoming toxic. There isn't a "we're doing this for the company" vibe, its all "we're doing this to meet our own targets and get people off our back"' workplace.
A lot of autonomy has been removed from the teams. You are often asked to do something and then asked again, and again, and again until you do it with no opportunity to discuss it. Management say they don't tell you what to do, but they handle things in such a way that it becomes next to impossible not to do it.
Completely shifting goals - what is important in the business at this moment in time might be gazumped by something else within a matter of weeks. This means it makes it very difficult to actually deliver anything of value, or expected growth of certain teams doesn't happen. Some teams have lost out on backfils for people who have left because of those priority changes but are still expected to deliver those really stretching results.
We focus way too much on short term wins instead of strategic long time opportunities. This is starting to change somewhat as we've broken our into ground transport - but the bread and butter of the business is short term rewards. I don't actually feel like i've delivered much value during my time in the business vs other places I have worked out.
Seems to be a real variance in people who are stretched and people who aren't. I regular work 50 hour weeks with meetings booked in until 6pm, yet other areas in the business definitely aren't feeling this pressure.
