Looking to build clearer career progression for your team?
Don't worry! Here are some good examples of public and open source frameworks and career pathways to help you or your team with personal growth.
Define and measure career growth for your team
Tired of looking at spreadsheets? Introducing Progression, the first ever toolkit for your team's skills and development.
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From the team: We love it when teams challenge the expected way of building progression frameworks. The 8th Light team and Claudia have devised a new way of looking at the problem, placing technical ability and organisational impact on different axes, reflecting the diversity of interest between 'born ICs' and people more interested in moving into leadership or management roles, amongst other things. The write-up introduction is a useful overview of the methodology.
Apptension focuses its guide heavily on technical skillsets with granular check-boxes for individual skills in a developer toolkit. There's some nice rationale around how to move between roles and what to do in your first couple of weeks, but it's missing the softer skills and may be a bit 'in the weeds' for some.
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The team at social scheduling app Buffer have put together one of the few purely generic frameworks, complete with write-up to cover how they've iterated through flat to more traditional company structure to get to their currently 80 staff. They also go into more detail about how they actually measure this, including levels and steps.
Brighton digital agency Clearleft have long been known for not only their work but their industry events, including UX London and Leading Design. The team have been vocal about career progression for years so it's nice to see how they imagine skills working within their team. The framework doesn't come with 'roles' so much as a bunch of defined skills which people can use to create their own.
From the team: A set of shared expectations that we use to explain Farewill engineering at different levels of seniority. We’ve intentionally focused on a core set of examples that we think can fairly apply to any engineer at Farewill, but they’re not intended as a finite list of everything a great developer could do or be. There are many ‘shapes’ of engineers, and we’ll aim to celebrate people’s different strengths whilst also aiming for fairness and clarity through our core expectations.
Still in Alpha (at the time of writing), but with its own mirosite and API(!?), British newspaper The Financial Times nods to previous work from GDS and various others with their in-depth framework for the 240+ staff in the CTO's organisation. This is a true product, and should grow and evolve over time.
One of the biggest frameworks in this collection, stretching across engineering, design and many more roles, Gitlab's dedication to documenting their people practices is admirable. Famously a remote team, the level of detail they've gone to is probably indicative of what's needed to both hire and run a global team asynchronously at scale.
Inspired again by Rent the Runway's work, Intent Media created their ladder to answer the questions of (a) what expectations everyone had of each other’s work; (b) what opportunities people had to grow within the company; and (c) what areas of their work they could focus on in order to best move into those new opportunities. There's a great description at the start of the PDF giving more context as to the company size which necessitated this.
Frameworks for product management and design from Dublin-based product legends intercom.
Product Management: Described as helping PMs to "Identify the most valuable problems to solve, enable your team to ship and iterate high-quality solutions quickly, and validate market impact". Breaks skills into five areas – 1) Insight Driven, 2) Strategy, 3) Execution, 4) Driving Outcomes and 5) Leadership Behaviors.
The product and content design framework is one of several open source resources on the beautiful intercom.design site, the format matches the PM ladder in part, though picking 'Products and Teams', 'Execution', 'Behaviours' and 'Results' as topics.
A fairly lightweight framework showing IC and leadership tracks, Jorge focuses on five pillars for engineers:
Technology: knowledge of the tech stack and tools
System: level of ownership of the system(s)
People: relationship with the team(s)
Process: level of engagement with the development process
Influence: scope of influence of the position.
Meetup just released their engineering ladders, alongside a great writeup of how they came to be. What's interesting here is the definition of a 'product engineering lead' - a role not associated with seniority (it isn't a title). Once again we see two paths, 'maker' and 'manager'. Levels go from 2 to 8 (with management roles from 5+). These align with wider company seniority levels - the holy grail of growth frameworks.
British bank Monzo first introduced this tool (now archived) in 2017 to help engineers and managers make development and career plans easier across Backend, Data, Mobile and Web development teams, later added a bunch more roles, including Design and Research.
Last year they deprecated their original framework, and created a v2 for Engineering in a PDF with an accompanying blog post. You can still see their original v1 framework on Progression, below.
From the author: At Ockam we [value our High Performance Team](https://www.ockam.io/learn/how-to-guides/high-performance-team/values_and_virtues_on_the_Ockam_Team/). It is the responsibility of The Team to provide an environment where every individual is empowered to be world-class in their role and to enable individuals to achieve more than they could dream possible for themselves. This level guide helps us to align expectations and to create a framework where we have a common language to describe growth paths.
Redgate takes personal development seriously. We invest heavily in development opportunities and support individuals with Personal Development Plans, growing both individuals and teams.
Our Progression Framework helps our people grow more effectively. Giving a common sense of direction, along with visibility of different roles, it helps people to understand how to develop themselves while helping us grow as a company.
Sarah has open-sourced career ladders that she developed in her role as an engineering manager and VP. These ladders include engineering, developer experience and also technical writing (for documentation) - something we haven't seen elsewhere to date.
She describes the levels as such:
Roles up to and including Senior, ladders are constructed around becoming the best at what one does that one might personally be.
At Staff level, the career expands to help others be successful with what you do and know, and scale yourself.
At Principal and beyond, you are trying to help others be the best that they can be, removing yourself and meeting others where they are.
Songkick's engineering framework is a really nicely designed PDF with seven different areas of competency: Leadership, Mentorship, Technical skills, Communication, Emotional intelligence, Delivery and Business knowledge. Some good reading presented in a clear and legible way. Because each level is on a single page, each employee could have it stuck to his or her space as a reminder.
Wise (formerly Transferwise) have built and published an interactive career map for their product team, including detailed salary bands across different geographies.
One of the reasons they cite for the career map being valuable was as part of a general re-addressing of their diversity, moving their gender balance in PM from 20% to 40% female. Read all about it in their blog post, below.
dxw have written a great accompanying blog post for their design ladder, explaining (amongst other things) the importance of parallel tracks and even how team members use the spreadsheets as part of meetings.
Also interesting to note that this framework is one of the few that separate skill levels and seniority levels (though for the most part senior designers have to top out most skills aside from leadership).
Define and measure career growth for your team
Tired of looking at spreadsheets? Introducing Progression, the first ever toolkit for your team's skills and development.
Get started
Level up your team (or yourself!)
Join the completely non-spammy progression.fyi mailing list
Further reading
Define and measure career growth for your team
Tired of looking at spreadsheets? Introducing Progression, the first ever toolkit for your team's skills and development.
Get started
Level up your team (or yourself!)
Join the completely non-spammy progression.fyi mailing list