- The company is conservative, top-down and waterfall-minded. Very matrixed and bureaucratized.
Booking can't be at the same level with the modern big tech companies like Uber, Spotify, etc. when it comes to agility, efficiency and scaling.
- Regulatory overkill at every step. While compliance is an important topic, the way it is enforced throughout the company is the major blocker of scalable growth. Practically every project requires a review from a Risk or Legal team. It shouldn't apply to inter-team or operational initiatives, as getting reply from Risk will take ages
- Layers and layers of middle managers that aren't independent and serve as a micro filter for directors and VP. They don't have a lot of judgement or expertise and become blockers in decision-making process.
- Not as data-driven as it should be. If you know how Uber or Spotify works with data, you will understand that Booking data standards are a bit behind. For example, it is still common to use a pie chart to communicate insights though it isn't a good data visualization method, especially for complex data. Data function focused in data-teams with low capacity while it is smarter to have generalists within each team who can query and model operational requests.
- The new reorg in the company was aimed at becoming more agile, however, the main organizational inefficiencies are still there: scattered finance teams working in complete silo with each other.
Outdated vision of tooling: pushing Jira to all teams, while its architecture became so complex that they can't scale it for the simplest needs, so it results in cutting off everything that doesn't fit into the framework. It is completely normal to have 2 project management tools and integrate them with each other as this is how process design offers agility.
- Extremely conservative people. The churn rate is very low, which means people stay at Booking for years. A lot of them have no idea how other companies and industries work and they know only the Booking way. People refuse using Slack and still cling to outdated chat tool that will be decommissioned soon. The company bought a huge AI tech stack for everyone and a lot of employees avoid it or believe it takes the personal touch away from their job. With this mindset the company can't grow.
- Heavily reliant on the project management culture. On a macro scale it makes sense, but operationally people wait to be spoon fed by project managers and can't self organise.
- A lot of micromanagement as control considered to be stronger than empowerment
- Extremely inefficient HQ in Amsterdam. While it looks great, it doesn't have enough meeting rooms, most of people work from home anyway. There aren't even enough sockets in the meeting rooms to charge laptops.
