Pros
Decent exit opportunities. Decent benefits package. The idea of 'owning' your own category is initially what attracted me to the role, and some of my colleagues on other teams actually did have this experience, but unfortunately that was not my experience.
Cons
- Your experience at the company depends heavily on your manager and team. On my team, performance reviews were not based on anything concrete, and managers can choose to give you poor (or great) performance reviews based on silly things, like how loud you are in meetings, or whether they get along well with you. - No real ownership of category. All decisions are passed down by leadership, and there's little room to actually set a business strategy for the category. The category managers have 'ownership' and the category specialists are pretty much their assistants who carry out the menial tasks. At least that's how it was for me.