Pros
It's an ok place to see how a global business works and to get some experience working on an environment with people from all over the world. Good work/life balance. You will be pushed to be data driven and if you never worked like that, you will learn to think this way.
Cons
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.
