Pros
The team is the best part of this job. The people I work with are good at what they do and they care about the work. Relationships with other departments are strong too — when we're left to coordinate directly with each other, things move fast and problems get solved without much friction.
Cons
Management is reactive, and the team absorbs the cost of that. Direction shows up late and usually isn't specific enough to act on, so work gets redone. Decisions get made without asking the people who are closest to them. Concerns raised tend to get redirected somewhere else instead of resolved. The bottleneck isn't the team's capability, it's how long it takes to get anything through that layer.