Pros
YouTrip is a well-known brand in Singapore and it’s meaningful to work on something so widely used. You can see and feel the impact when people pull out the purple card on the MRT or in JB. The company also offers strong exposure to the issuing and fintech space. I had the chance to learn how card networks, processors, banks and FX providers fit together behind the scenes. This experience is valuable if you want to grow your career in payments. YouTrip also maintains a relatively generous hybrid setup with two work-from-home days each week. At a time when many organisations are pushing employees back into the office full-time, this is a welcome move that encourages work-life balance.
Cons
YouTrip is running into organisational issues that are increasingly hard to ignore at its current scale. Many of these problems are structural rather than temporary. Compensation and benefits sit well below market, both in startup and fintech circles. Offers are pegged to previous salaries instead of transparent compensation bands, and annual leave starts at just 15 days — ironically low for a travel company. Progression and performance evaluations are unclear. There are no real rubrics or level expectations. Performance grading is opaque even to managers, with final ratings sitting with senior leadership. In a company of this size, it often feels like visibility to the C-suite matters more than actual competency. Across functions, responsibilities are poorly performed. Teams often avoid owning decisions, pass work sideways, and aren’t held accountable when scope is dropped or delayed. If you’re a Product Manager in this environment, expect to pick up the slack of other teams because the finger frequently points at you. A big contributor to this is how leadership handles mistakes. Objectives are often vague, expectations are poorly set, and employees are expected to produce proposals and data from a blank slate with very little guidance. When things inevitably go off course, the response is more blame than support. This is albeit the root cause being the lack of clarity from the top and not the people trying to execute. Transparency is also limited, and leadership is not meaningfully open to feedback. Employees rarely see company metrics or the roadmap, several town halls have been cancelled and engagement survey results that were promised were never shared. More importantly, the same concerns around transparency, compensation, levelling and benefits have been raised repeatedly by multiple generations of employees and even directors, with little real action taken. Turnover reflects all of this. The Product team of eight was effectively reset twice during my time here. Instead of addressing underlying issues, leadership tends to backfill quickly with shortened hiring processes — repeating the same cycle rather than fixing it.
