far from start-up, close to stagnation - Anonymous employee Tripadvisor Employee Review

as many others say, tripadvisor is not a company that takes risks. that leads towards a lot of complacence as well as frustrated/hindered talent. probably a primary reason that many have left, as i did. marketing team runs amok with inflated egos. sales team seems to be a complete joke (leadership is epitome of wheelers and dealers who couldn't sell a product that required any calculated or strategic thought whatsoever, much less have the professionalism, innovation or foresight to keep themselves relevant for that much longer). product and engineering teams (just hire more actual engineers, and less ops folks) look ok, though seem to lose someone important once a quarter senior management is fooling themselves thinking this is a start-up. you're far from being a lean organization, my friends. deal with the growing pains. reward employees that deserve to be rewarded. communicate proposed changes and request as much feedback as possible. put more things up to vote. take a hard look at your middle mgt because you have redundant and irrelevant folks holding up the contributions of direct reports. and finally: take a darn risk with a product once in awhile. the facelift for the site last year was ok but it's time to give people something to really talk about with your UX and interface.