Pros
Opportunity to work on large-scale enterprise projects and collaborate with analysts, QA, developers, and business stakeholders. The role provides strong exposure to end-to-end product delivery and complex business processes.
There are talented individuals across several teams, especially among analysts and QA, who are knowledgeable and collaborative. The experience can help designers develop stakeholder management and enterprise product thinking skills.
Kontras
From my perspective, project planning and expectation management are often the biggest challenges.
Design teams are frequently asked to support aggressive timelines and expanding requirements, while project scope and priorities continue to change throughout delivery. This makes it difficult to maintain design quality and establish a sustainable design process.
Many decisions are driven by delivery targets and client requests rather than user needs, product strategy, or realistic team capacity. Stakeholders often commit to requests before validating effort, impact, and timeline implications.
Project management quality is inconsistent, and frequent PM turnover can create communication gaps, shifting priorities, and unclear ownership. As a result, designers often spend significant time managing alignment instead of focusing on user experience improvements.
Vendor resources may also experience different treatment compared to internal employees, particularly in workload distribution and ownership expectations.