The problem at our hand
Professional growth is the number one priority for professionals seeking employment today. The simple question whether or not team members can see their career goals being met at a company does not only affect their engagement and their productivity - It also very directly affects employee retention. And hiring is very expensive and time consuming. The bigger the team, the more crucial this becomes.
Running a large design organization also comes with additional challenges. We have a diverse set of skills and highly specialized teams, making it hard to look at career progression in a one-size-fits-all approach. We have UX designers, visual and UI designers, creative designers, motion designers, illustrators, UX writers, design system and tooling specialists and DesignOps across our centralized and embedded design teams. And they all share similar key questions:
What is expected of me given my role and experience?
How do I grow professionally and advance my career?
We have been measuring the perception of these and other key questions using key drivers over multiple years and we can clearly see that we had an urgent need to upgrade our career laddering framework. Historically we have been using a skill based matrix, but this matrix was no longer able to support the growth of or diverse and often highly specialised team members. A new career framework had to be established.
The Goal
Provide transparency for designers for what’s expected in their role.
Manage expectations of peers who are working with designers at different levels.
Inform actionable development plans to close the gap between the next level/position.
Create an objective way to have a fair and equitable discussion amongst teams esp. With regard to salaries
Support the hiring process in setting expectations with candidates
Understanding context and constraints
In order to build meaningful career ladders for all designers we had to consider various constraints.
Understanding IC and manager career tracks (Dual tracks)
Single track career ladders (one ladder for everyone) are only feasible in very small organizations. The specific expectations that we have from managers in comparison to the expectations we have of individual contributors have to be acknowledged and clearly communicated. As a mature organization we want to be able to provide opportunities that actually align with the professional aspirations of team members rather than forcing them into roles that don’t play to their strengths. Not everyone wants to be a manager and incentivizing growth as an IC has proven to fuel innovation and excellence.
Understanding the different nature of work across the different teams and specialisations (Multi Track)
Considering that we have various specialisations in the team we also need to provide clarity on growth prospects and expectations that align with the specific role. For example: The professional growth of an illustrator does not entirely match the growth of a design system specialist.
Understanding Team Size, Maturity, Org Structure, Industry standards and Geographies
Understanding norms and best practices is critical since most people plan their career not only in one organization. The team size and maturity also indicates the level of required complexity for a framework.
Understanding Skill based vs competency based frameworks
Skills are well defined and can usually be developed and measured. They are transferable between roles, companies or projects. Skills are used to perform tasks. Competencies often insinuate skills without calling them out. They are more about behaviours and attitudes. They describe a person's ability to reach certain outcomes or have certain impact without specifying how to get there. They are value based. Competencies are the natural choice as outcomes and results ultimately contribute to an organization's performance.
Iterating forward
Our first iteration was to create individual ladders for each job group. With motion, creative, illustration, UX, UI, Design system, web design and DesignOps having individual career ladders. Each ladder had an IC and a manager track.
We grouped all relevant competencies into three areas:
Scope
The level of influence and impact a specific role has on the organization. This ranges from a small scope only on a stream level with lots of oversight over product or organizational impact with very little oversight to industry influence with zero oversight.
Complexity
The complexity of problems that are being solved and the level of skill and expertise required to solve problems.
Leadership
The extent to which a person influences others through guidance and mentorship as well as evangelism and hiring.
Each of these areas was broken up into specific competencies that describe the expectations for a given level. When measuring how well the framework performs against our goals we realized that this approach caused friction. Attempting to define universal competencies came at the cost of them being generic. They did not clearly indicate specific expectations and so Designers felt that they did not clearly answer fundamental questions on clarity of the role and expectation and clarity on how to grow and level up. We decided to substitute each competency with specific examples from our experience. Example: Instead of only broadly describing what outcomes we expect from a Level 2 Web Designer in regards to stakeholder management, we also added examples of what designers at that level actually did and achieved. This made the levels much clearer and relatable and helped designers to see a clear path for their growth.
Our second iteration still contained individual ladders for individual job groups. Considering that each of these ladders, we had 7 in total, required a dual track for IC as well as manager tracks it became a tremendous effort to develop and also potentially maintain that many different job ladders. At Gojek we have a 10 level framework, with the design levels going from 1-7 and the manager track starting from level 4. This means we have to account for 77 levels and specific descriptions. It became impossible to maintain.
We also saw this much specialization actually hinders us in various ways.
Lateral movement of designers between teams became complicated.
Performance evaluation and promotions had to be limited to very specific attributes
Potential questions of different remuneration for different job ladders should be avoided to maintain equal pay across all our designers.
Maintainability of the framework and further development and iterations are nearly impossible.
This brought us to our latest iteration where we tried to combine all job ladders into a unified one. The key that allowed us to do that is to further develop the specific examples we associate with each level. Through a wealth of specific examples of how a specific level manifests in real life, we were able to maintain the requirement of specialized teams. To use the same example of stakeholder management as a competency, we would not only describe expected outcomes but also have a wealth of examples of how these expectations translate for individual job groups. Stakeholder management at a given level might look different for a person who is embedded into a business unit as compared to a designer who is serving multiple units through a centralized agency model.
Ultimately this allowed us to achieve the right outcomes.
Outcome and Impact
The first level of validation happened through our reports on key drivers. Perception improved significantly across all of the core aspects we were evaluating
The Level matches the role and responsibilities of team members
Team members clearly understood expectations and their roles and responsibilities
Team members saw a clear path on how to grow within the organization
We also noticed that in performance evaluation and promotion calibrations we were able to leverage the framework more broadly, rather than having to rely on an overly narrow perspective on an individual's performance, ultimately allowing us to build stronger cases for promotions.
Internal transfers became much easier. Many team members have aspirations to explore other teams and other specializations based on projects or a given time frame. The inclusive framework allowed us to leverage these efforts in performance evaluation and promotion considerations. Many designers prefer to grow in a holistic way and our career ladder allow them to follow their aspirations more effectively.
Ultimately, maintaining and further improving the career framework became much easier as only one ladder needs to be maintained.
Insights
Some of the key insights and principles that enabled this process were
Roles over Titles
We always felt that titles are secondary. A designation says very little about expectations, hence our focus has always been on understanding first and foremost the roles.
Participatory design and community driven iterations
The only way to build meaningful career ladders that actually help designers grow, is to involve them. The best person to describe what we expect of a level 3 UX designer, is a person who works at that level. Simon Sinek speaks of distributing decisions to those most affected by them. In our case this meant that we delegated responsibility as well as authority about career ladders to those most affected by them and involving them deeply in the entire process.
Data driven DesignOps
Leveraging data to validate whether an intervention actually leads to the desired outcome is key. Not only to justify our efforts, but also to fully understand what success actually looks like. Only real data can give us the confidence to ascertain whether or not we are on the right track.