Great people, no growth opportunities - Senior Experience Designer Best Buy Employee Review

First off, not only are you delivering separate desktop, mobile, and app designs for every project because the site isn't responsive, and the people at this company don't think responsively, but the tech stack is also very old, slow, and out of date. The teams cannot innovate or build exciting things because they face many issues with how old the code is or how it's been configured as a Frankenstein, and you'll notice how slow bestbuy.com is every time you do QA or even use their website. If you're used to having any say in ideation, strategy, or vision, you might want to avoid this UX org. All the design ideas come down from the very top leadership. UX isn't even allowed to be involved in roadmapping with Product or Engineering, which, as you expect, causes a lot of timing and delivery issues for design when they weren't invited to tell the team how long something will take to create. Inside the UX org itself, there is too much leadership, lots of directors and associate directors making decisions, and no one is on the same page or aligned with what goals we are actually achieving. The goal post of deliverables always changes, as soon as you think you're done, they expect you to completely 180* your designs for a design review with the VP in 2 days. There is a VP who is trying to do really great things, but every single director or manager is very unclear about what is expected of their teams, which leads to a lot of gaslighting and frustration. Unnecessary high-fidelity design work is praised and expected as the bare minimum to make leadership look good. A lot of the time, there is urgency on a project just so you can show it to the VP and get approval, and then the work goes nowhere because actual Product & Engineering teams are getting their project orders from somewhere else. Nearly 80% of everything I worked on there died out. They use Design Leads almost as reviewers of Senior and Junior and contractor work, and Managers who are supposed to be asking you about your future and growth have switched to needing to be more involved in the execution of design, so conversations about how to grow here have dissolved, plus it's super hard to move teams if you're interested, and they now just evaluate you against expectations they never made clear before. It went from being valued to being compared to expectations. The design ops org is also very immature. For a company with such high design expectations, they have one person managing their entire design library for over 200 designers, and the components are often super messy, so designers have to pull them apart to create their own. There are no governance or standards, and requests for new components can take months, if not years, to design and develop, which is why everything on BestBuy.com is customized. Also, I hope you like managing your own Jira tickets, because there are no Project Managers or Scrum Masters managing the work. You're your own project manager, responsible for so much more than just design.