Myopic, immature, and erratic leadership perpetuating a culture of fear - werkgeversreview Product Manager bij Hopper

Hopper is a great place to work if - You don't care about the quality of the product/brand you work on - You don't care about the scummy dark tactics that your company uses to earn money - You welcome unlimited scope creep, made worse at every turn by the lack of quality in every aspect of the product - You like to acquiesce to leadership's erratic demands - You don't care about job security 1) Leadership is immature and myopic. Many senior leaders are not there because of merit but because of having the right relationships at a time of growth. Their immaturity and lack of experience show with erratic, incoherent, and outlandish demands as well as the obvious favoritism that runs rampant in the company. It's scary to think how many livelihoods they have in the palm of their hands. Instead of having a unique vision, leadership is obsessed with chasing after this Super App idea, and your role will be essentially to copy Pinduoduo. They solely focus on the glossy growth metrics, and thus the overall product quality is atrocious because quality "doesn't matter" for growth - bugs, typos, grammar errors, legal issues are abound everywhere in the app, and will never be prioritized. Users HATE the product (3.9 stars on Google Play), and product teams can't respond to user feedback because of leadership's shortsighted vision to appease investors. As a result, tech debt is massive and the high turnover (see below) means each team spends a ton of time untangling past tech debt while being extremely constrained to deliver on new features that have high quality. To make things worse, leadership got rid of all QA testers during the March 2020 layoffs and have skimped on this ever since; product managers go on rotation every app release to manage app release for both iOS and Android, and that's in addition to needing to conduct manual testing for everything you have ever built every two weeks. If you don't care about the quality of the product you're building and just want to focus on the growth metrics while sweeping everything else under the rug, this is the place for you. 2) Single-threaded ownership (STO) means unlimited scope creep. Product managers are seen as the single-threaded owners of their lanes (acting as GMs essentially), which means everything you could affect the outcome of your thread's business metrics becomes your responsibility. Is there another team doing something reckless, at the demand of leadership, that causes major negative downstream effects on what you own? It's your responsibility to fix it, and good luck if that other team is favored by leadership and have a hall pass for all their mistakes. While STO has its advantages, this means product managers are extremely burdened with things outside of their job description and control. In other words, certain teams can recklessly build towards improving the growth metrics and not care about how it could ruin the product elsewhere for other teams. At a high level, this means that many teams contribute to the code base with inconsistent standards, and I can imagine an audit of the code could literally bring the company down. As a result, I would be wary of the incredible growth metrics that the company boasts because I've personally seen how atrocious the data architecture is, and I would now trust where PR/leadership is pulling their numbers from. 3) Job stability doesn't exist at Hopper. The company loves firing people without notice or warning (no PIP process), and has conducted multiple rounds of layoffs in 2022 despite the CEO saying this would not occur. They fired the entire data science department, most of the recruiters, and a ton of front-line support staff. To make things worse, leadership is immature and is easily swayed by other problematic "leaders" who take advantage of the politics of influence (read: favoritism). As a result, there is a fear to stand your ground (one of the company's values is to have backbone, ironically), and leadership's ideas, unbacked by data, must be shipped in earnest by the product team. There is a lot of anxiety, paranoia, and fear caused by the leadership's incoherent demands and willingness to fire on the spot, which detract from data-backed product development. Have a complaint? They will not shut up about how Hopper takes after Amazon & Netflix's cutthroat culture and this is the blanket explanation for everything. I don't think Amazon & Netflix even take things this seriously. There is seriously a dark energy at Hopper where you can see the palpable fear people have for their jobs, and are unable to have backbone and speak out.