Local Projects Reviews

LP's org structure and process exist to enable the whims of the CEO, who will micromanage any project he takes an interest in, at the expense of everyone working under him. His last-second pivots make designers pull all-nighters, and his improvisation during client meetings result in radical scope-creep and poor client expectations that project managers are left to clean up. He will force creative decisions in Concepting/Design phases that are completely out of scope or infeasible, but in Production phases he will blame the team when the project is over budget. There are more Project Managers than Designers, which reflects a terrible lack of process and efficiency; management bodies are thrown at projects to handle accounts and triage needs, but there is no increase in the capacity of delivery teams. PMs have only two options if they would like to do their job well: Say "yes" to every thing the CEO wants and destroy the work-life balance of delivery team members ("YES" is written in huge letters of the studio wall); or wage a hopeless and exhausting campaign to try and improve their projects' process—i.e., spend huge amounts of time trying to manage/assuage/contain the CEO. While employees may be proud of their work, I did not hear a single person say anything positive about LP's culture in my time there. From junior designers to department directors, I only heard lamenting—primarily about work/life balance and the problems with the CEO, upper management and new business, PMs, HR and pay, and a handful of toxic personalities at various levels. HR is woefully inadequate: Reviews are many months late, bonuses and raises are scant, and there are many outlandishly poor decisions in internal messaging (e.g., an email to the whole studio about how comp days will only be considered if you've worked a minimum of 68 hours in a week—knowing how overworked everyone is on a consistent basis). LP sometimes rips off clients. In my time, I was directed to bill a client for the scoped hours of a high-level role that was actually working less than 25% of the scoped time. This cost the client over $100,000 in fake hours, easily. Your job might be okay if you are lucky enough to have no project that the CEO takes an interest in, though. —But that won't last forever. Take a job with LP if you're in a real pinch, but don't stop your job search!!

Pay is laughable leadership and hr is tone deaf to world and employee issues projects and designs get bottlenecked by one or two culture is one where toxic behavior is ignored and rewarded if you are a "critical billable resource" or threaten to quit