Vantaggi
You get to design products and see them put into production. It's pretty amazing to see your work be designed and manufactured. The designers on the team have a great community and it feels like a family.
Svantaggi
Summer is structured by business unit and the designers are aligned to specific business units. They lost their head of design about 4 years and have struggled to find a new person to stay in that role. The reporting structure doesn't enable designers to be heard and prevents them from doing good work. Each business unit has a marketing person and a business unit leader, unfortunately across all teams these individuals have very little design experience yet they lead the product design for their groups. This is extremely frustrating and causes you to design a lot of products that already exist. Business unit leaders govern product design based on price and competition more than user needs and wants. Summer lacks any sort of design research they only bring users in at the end of the process to validate things already in production or to seed reviews. Although I think this is a great place for marketing and business roles, designers have little power in this organization. Some business Unit leaders act as dictators rather than partners and the result is poorly designed products which only sell due to cost and product placement.