I feel like I was scammed - Product Designer ICON Employee Review

You'll hear the word "design" a lot when leadership talks about how important it is. But as time went by, it was clear that this was not the case. Sure, the brand design was important, the marketing design was important, the industrial design, architectural design was important (and in fact, it's quite beautiful)...but UX design was not put on the same pedestal. UX design was not well integrated into "design" at ICON. In fact, it felt like we were seen as a bottleneck to progress, our work only being worth something when it was developed. And yeah, our work does need to get developed, but how are you helping that happen when you take our dev resources away to work on a marketing site after you paid a company a good amount of money just to disappoint you with it? Despite having no dev resources, the UX team did a phenomenal job of getting ahead of them to start full force the next year. A whole new suite of software, new design to match the redesign that hit us out of nowhere, a very thorough design system, product strategy against all odds. I'm proud of the work we did, but because of the division in design and what seems like personal issues at play, our team did not get the credit it deserved, and were not given the chance to shine. Instead, we were let go, and our managers had no idea and were given no say. Despite the amazing mission, this is still a startup just like any other. It's a business, never forget that. I did.