Pros
Wonderful coworkers, cool office, open-door policy with founders, genuine efforts to create a good culture (outside of creative), hybrid schedule, decent pay for certain teams (not creative), fun company celebrations.
Cons
1. Founders and senior leadership don't understand how to structure or run a creative team. This has resulted in several restructures within a single year and the promotion of catastrophically bad leadership. Since the last restructure, more than half of the creative team has left, including all senior-level designers, developers, writers and account leaders. 2. The strategy that guides creative is done by another team who has no business touching anything related to copy, design or development. The result is jumbled, cliche and messy thinking that is treated as gospel. Leadership demands this poor strategy form the backbone of all creative - pushback or alternative ideas are not tolerated and are seen as combative behavior. 3. Sales currently oversees creative. These people have zero experience leading or working as writers, designers, developers or account exec/PMs and have no respect or appreciation for marketing or creative teams. They see creative teams as nothing more than robots on a production line. The result is a demoralizing, dictatorial, chaotic and toxic environment. 4. There's no communication about anything going on with the team. Massive changes happen over night, team leaders change with no explanation, un-earned promotions are common, processes appear and disappear overnight, titles change with no clear rationale, etc. Any time a change or shift happens, questions or pushback are not tolerated. Leadership expects creatives to accept bad and random decision-making with a smile. And the worst part: all these changes only make things worse. 5. Sales likes to dictate to creative exactly what they want, word-for-word. But when the project fails to produce results, the problem is with creative, not the people armchair creative directing everything. Current leadership of creative doesn't have the back of the team and happily passes the blame to the writers and designers in the trenches who had no hand in the thinking or strategy. Good ideas are frequently shutdown simply because it would hurt the ego of leadership to upgrade their mediocre idea. 6. Creative leadership - or what's left of it - is a cult of personality ... or LinkedIn influencers with no real experience. The loudest voice in the room ends up in charge -- regardless of their ability, experience or record of success. Routinely, people hired to work on other teams were placed in charge of creative. The result was major failure and half the team leaving. 7. There's a total lack of visibility when it comes to who is actually leading creative. Senior company leadership outright denies access to that information. There's a shadow cabal of people making decisions regarding creative, but no one knows who it is or what their motivations are. Yet, random sales people continue to dictate important aspects of the team like pay, titles, hiring, structure and even offerings. 8. Expressing concern about all the chaos and toxic work environment is frowned upon and will quickly get you labeled as a troublemaker -- and summarily pushed out of the company. In summary: As it stands now, look elsewhere if you're considering a job at Triad as a creative. There are lots of places that will treat you better and pay you more.
