Pros
- Work-Life balance - Nice office spaces across Europe - London and Berlin. There are free snacks and barista-prepared drinks. - Increased benefits, dental has just been added. - New Design joiners can command a good salary at market rates, the company vision is also motivating from a new joiner perspective. - Smart, talented peers - The group of individual design contributors working hard to drive design at Stepstone. A great bunch of people to learn from and collaborate with.
Cons
Design Management - Several big things have recently happened in the Design team. The reasoning behind the decision-making doesn’t make sense, Design management just execute and don’t push back on decisions from above because they don’t care about designers. - Design leadership needs management training as a few should not be responsible for anything as important as the experience of a designer, there’s no accountability. They just pat themselves on the back for executing poor decisions that are not in the favour of the team. - I don’t trust my design manager or wider design leadership have my interests as a priority. They can pump out as many documents and slack post updates as possible then talk about it in as many meetings as they want but their current actions speak louder. Design Team Happiness It’s low, understandably. There’s a quarterly survey to gauge team happiness. The baseline is below average, with most of the team being a detractor overall. - No promotions, lack of progression, lack of growth and development . This is extremely frustrating. I should have the opportunity to apply to the open lead/management level design roles but we are all blocked, external applicants only. Then they ask us to share and like their posts on LinkedIn, adding insult to injury. - No clarity on how performance is being measured. We are constantly waiting on a design matrix which is always in progress, lots of talk and meetings about it. Product A lot of the Stepstone Product people are not experts but get to make decisions that impact the user experience. They give limiting, contradictory input lacking a clear understanding of product goals and metrics. They focus excessively on superficial metrics like clicks, and never know what they are they trying to understand or learn. The execution often falls short of the vision, especially with AI-focused initiatives, there can be a big difference between what is proposed and what is delivered. Design Roles I’m not happy working at Stepstone. I’m looking for opportunities elsewhere as they are non-existent for designers as I will have to work more, earning less if I stay. If anyone is looking to join Stepstone for any of the open design roles assume the following: - You will be expected to be outstanding in a tough Product environment. - Onboarding is a OKR marked for improvement but currently is poorly managed. - You might not get promotions or bonuses.
