Workday Associate Product Designer reviews

Management culture tends to be performative especially in the UX design org - there’s a large gap between stated values and lived reality. Performance reviews feel subjective and relationship driven rather than merit based, which makes career growth feel arbitrary. Compensation increases are also well below market rate, especially compared to peers in the industry.

If you're a designer who genuinely cares about usability, craft, and mentorship, this likely isn’t the right environment for you. A significant portion of the platform is built using an internal coding language that is highly restrictive. Even relatively small design improvements—like repositioning a button—can be either infeasible or require months of engineering effort. These constraints make it extremely difficult to iterate on existing designs or introduce new solutions that align with usability best practices. There’s also a noticeable lack of mentorship culture within the larger design team (purely my own experience). Many principal designers, particularly those who have been at the company for a decade or more, appear more focused on advancing their own careers than supporting others. In some cases, foundational design practices—such as organizing files or using tools like auto layout in Figma—are inconsistently applied, which can make inheriting and collaborating on work unnecessarily challenging. Design input often feels undervalued unless it comes from long-tenured team members. Cross-functional collaboration, especially with UX research, tends to default to reinforcing leadership perspectives rather than advocating for user-centered improvements. As a result, pushback around usability concerns is frequently overlooked, even when it leads to downstream product issues. Because of these limitations, it can be difficult to feel a sense of pride in the work, particularly if you value creating thoughtful, user-friendly experiences.