Pros
My peers were amazing: understanding, supportive, and passionate about their jobs and responsibilities. There is a genuine hunger to learn more and be the best designer possible, executed through routine critiques, lunch and learn style sharing, and group knowledge shares.
Cons
There is some wider organization that needs to be done for an experience team to truly function. We spent time producing minimum viable products that were not necessarily user-friendly and would maybe never see the light of day anyway. The project intake process needed organization and more detail, and lacked stakeholder buy-in, leading to scope creep. Demands would find their way into briefs that designers should have no business solving and executing for. For example, we were often assigned the creation of presentations, where we had a primary responsibility in generating content in which we did not have expertise. The organization is incredibly siloed, which made researching user experience issues for both employees and customers extremely difficult, and senior leadership placed the onus on brand new, entry-level employees for breaking down these siloes and navigating the organization without an org chart or diagram of the organizational function at large.