Great people, poor leadership - Anonymous employee IXDS Employee Review

A team of excellent and interesting people with a heart, many side interests and a willingness to accept the downsides to preserve the organization. Space to experiment, unfortunately without backup from management. 4 day week. Great office spaces.

No willingness of management to translate the self-proclaimed interest in self-organization into any meaningful experiments and learning. This was followed by the inability of the top management to lead any initiative beyond conceptual stages, frequent and visible in-fighting and dysfunctional communication full of empty promises and inconsequent planning. The result was an acquisition by a large consultancy (de-facto bankruptcy) and dissolving of most of the team from before 2019. No chances to develop, an adequate salary, combined with an extreme difference in income between founders and even the topmost of the staff. HR not on the side of staff. No meaningful and visible portfolio work. A lot of public overselling of competencies in technology topics with little coordinated knowledge-creation.

IXDS is made up of an incredibly inspiring and completely diverse group of designers, technologists and strategists. It's easy to really connect with people. The workplace has fantastic atmosphere and you end up chatting with everyone and learning lots. The culture is great with skill sharing, visibility of current projects and socials. Some of the projects were really interesting and you can get a really nice mix of experiences across service design and development.

Perhaps there could have been more structure to the internship with things to be getting on with when it's not possible to bring interns onto projects. The company was going through many changes at that time so it was sometimes difficult to get on projects.