Desperation and mediocrity - Product Designer WillowTree Employee Review

A few thoughts: 1. We are desperate for business and will let a client abusive and over worked team for years to keep that business. The morale of being on these abused teams are so low that we have given up trying to improve this hostage situation that leadership has but us in with the abuser. 2. Desperation is woven throughout the work we do. I’ve never seen such poor work land on a client’s desk because we freaked out and rushed it. The lack of strategical thinking and quality work is embarrassing. I worry that out anxiety-driven mentality will just keep leading to terrible work not driven by the actually user needs. 3. Desperation hurts the entire team. The people doing the actual work, no longer get to lead where it’s going. It’s become a very top down culture where you are basically the hands of whatever leadership’s desperate “strategy” to save the client needs next. I’ve never seen so many brains waisted by this technique. I can’t remember the last time leadership asked our team what the client actually wants even though we work with them day to day. 4. Leadership skills are an actual joke. This is one of the biggest ones for me but I’ve never seen such a poor level of industry knowledge and craft in leadership. The head of design comes from marketing and doesn’t understand product design (it’s embarrassing). I don’t think our middle management has ever gone to leadership training or pushed their industry knowledge as well. This alone, burns me out more than anything else. It’s like a club of useless men commanding every designer to burn out while not even knowing half of time what they’re talking about. 5. Culture is the worst I’ve seen at any workplace. I was so excited to work at Willow Tree and to be in person before I realized that all of it was fake. Leaders weaponize lattice to make sure people constantly have a smile on their face. The team attends internal design meeting out of fear that if they don’t they will get bad lattice feedback which will eventually lead to layoffs. There is no loyalty of love but on driven through fear of showing any cracks in our forever forced disposition. This also leads to the designers themselves not showing the vulnerability needed to actually grow as a team and and to grow their craft. There’s not one designer on our team that plans to stay here more than a year. We’re doing portfolio reviews even, it’s bad. 6. The future vision stuff is incredibly cringe. True innovative thinking is driven through industry knowledge and user insights not the first buzzword you hear in 2023. It’s actually embarrassing trying to pretend like we are somewhat ahead of other agencies when our research department practices archaic and sterile methods that leads to little to no user insights. Also, no I don’t care about your book Tobias. It actually angers me that you spend more time talking about your book than your plans to fix the culture problems itself. 7. Telus is a joke. Being acquired by them is your own doom. Have fun having a telcom company leave you in scraps at the end with only the worker left that either are so deep in Stockholm syndrome they can’t see the toxicity over flowing or that are just so bad they can’t find jobs elsewhere. 8. Side note for anyone still considering: they’ll cut your benefits in middle of the year and not allow management to tell you. Your “raises” if you get them won’t even match inflation. Never go to an agency in the red in general. The pay is awful.