From my perspective, project planning and expectation management are often the biggest challenges.
Design teams are frequently asked to support aggressive timelines and expanding requirements, while project scope and priorities continue to change throughout delivery. This makes it difficult to maintain design quality and establish a sustainable design process.
Many decisions are driven by delivery targets and client requests rather than user needs, product strategy, or realistic team capacity. Stakeholders often commit to requests before validating effort, impact, and timeline implications.
Project management quality is inconsistent, and frequent PM turnover can create communication gaps, shifting priorities, and unclear ownership. As a result, designers often spend significant time managing alignment instead of focusing on user experience improvements.
Vendor resources may also experience different treatment compared to internal employees, particularly in workload distribution and ownership expectations.