Pros
The creative team responsible for rolling out Driveway has some of the most talented designers I've ever worked with. In pre-Covid times, there was a lot of treating employees to dinner and coffee to just say "thanks" for a job well done and connect on a human level with upper leadership.
Cons
The following is only for the PDX Innovation Lab, and not a Lithia-wide issue: 1. Promotions occur once per year, in December/January during your yearly review. However, you'll be asked to step into your promoted role early with all the responsibilities attached to that work. You will not be compensated for this additional work, nor will you have the new title to reflect your new position. 2. Your accomplishments and achievements go unrecognized and you'll be asked to sacrifice your spare time for company needs. Here's an example to illustrate this: To celebrate one of our major launches, upper leadership had a guest speaker discuss his own achievement of walking across Antarctica alone, nearly dying several times. The takeaway that I, and several others on my team got from that experience was, "It doesn't matter how hard you worked, please keep pushing yourself further until your body almost literally gives out" and we were encouraged to text upper leadership at all hours of the day and night if we needed to. 3. Senior management can promise falsehoods and not be held accountable. I was personally promised a bonus that I was later told was impossible to get as the manager in question was not authorized to offer it. This manager was let go, but leadership's attempts at making good on his offer of a bonus went dark after a few weeks. I never got the bonus. 4. The CEO's opinion outweighs everyone's—no matter if you are an expert engineer, designer, marketer—data is not useful to dissuade their uninformed opinions. I have seen this multiple times when launching the new brand, Driveway. I was asked to rewrite the same two paragraphs over 10 times until the CEO was satisfied. Unfortunately, that satisfaction was short lived as the copy was replaced with something the CEO wrote themselves. 5. Infighting among the c-suite causes friction at the team-level. Turf battles are abundant and drag many teammates into the fray. There is a constant struggle for ownership and control over brand and creative—this plays out as multiple revisions to the same design element, brand tagline, brand colors, etc. Nothing stays the same for long resulting in hours of work to edit previously "approved" work with little to no explanation. 6. Collaboration is a sacred word invoked only when a teammate is asked to fall in line. Collaboration only occurs at the c-level where aforementioned turf wars rage—everyone else just needs to take orders. I was explicitly told, more than once, to not offer any feedback on creative work although I developed the original brand with the product design manager. 7. Leadership's approach to agile development comes from an uninformed place. The individuals with product development expertise are ignored for those who can say "yes" to whichever promise the CEO has made to Lithia investors. The end result suffers, the product unusable but, hey, it has a nice veneer and the product looks like it works.