That time I thought about team growth.
I did it! I hired the best damn UX team, rallied them behind common processes and workflows, built strong friendships and collaborations - I was flying high.
That is until one day when a bright and ambitious young designer approached me with a question that sent me crashing back to earth: "What do I need to do to reach the next level in my career?"
At that moment, my lack of a clear answer revealed a glaring gap in our team's structure.
As I grappled with the realization that I couldn't provide a straightforward response, I recognized the broader issue at hand.
Our team lacked a well-defined career ladder for UX designers and writers. This not only left individuals like the young designer in the dark about their career progression but also made it challenging for HR to understand the unique skills within our team. This, in turn, affected their ability to determine compensation levels and establish appropriate hiring requirements.
Additionally, the absence of a clear career ladder had the potential to impact team morale. Without a published standard, there was a risk of designers comparing themselves to others on the team based on subjective opinions, creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and the potential for unintentional competition and designer-to-designer resentment. This highlighted the importance of establishing a comprehensive career ladder as a proactive measure to maintain a healthy and collaborative work environment, mitigating the possibility of such challenges arising.
Determined to rectify this situation, I rallied the team to collaboratively define a comprehensive career ladder for UX design. Our journey began with a collective effort to identify competencies we deemed critical to each role. Everyone was invited to have a voice at the table. Leadership scoured career ladders across the industry, curating a list of competencies that aligned us with the broader design community. Senior designers clarified proficiency levels required for each competency. More junior designers provided a sounding board for how understandable each competency was and how it aligned (or didn’t) with their expectations and interpretations.
Pooling these inputs, I crafted a career ladder that spanned both management and individual contributor tracks, encompassing 17 different career levels from associate designer through assistant vice president of design. To ensure clarity and relevance, we distinctly defined the expectations for each track. The management track emphasized people leadership, team development, and alignment across designers and initiatives. In contrast, the individual contributor track honed in on feature or initiative leadership, peer mentoring, and a depth of expertise in one or more specific domains, such as information architecture, UI and visual design, content design and UX writing, or experience architecture. This nuanced approach aimed to recognize and cultivate the diverse strengths within our team, providing a clear trajectory for growth tailored to each individual's strengths and aspirations.
Check it out!
Click here to download a PDF of the career ladder. That’s right, I want you to have it - and if you want to tailor it to your team, I’ve got it in spreadsheet and Figma formats, just contact us and let us know what you need!
But the collaboration didn't stop there. I presented the ladder to the team, inviting their insights, edits, questions, and tweaks. Through a series of workshops and discussions, we refined and polished the ladder, ensuring it resonated with the unique dynamics of our team.
With a well-forged career ladder in hand, we approached HR, who swiftly adopted the format and model as a company-wide best practice for large complex teams. The HR and compensation teams were thrilled that the ladder provided sufficient detail to align compensation levels, hiring decisions, and promotions across teams, reducing human bias and creating equitable opportunities. We extended our efforts, sharing the ladder across the product team, research team, and engineering teams, offering mentoring to other leaders to aid those teams in building appropriate career ladders for their areas.
The true test, however, came during annual performance evaluations and informal manager check-ins. The career ladder became our guiding compass, providing a clear framework for assessing individual growth and accomplishments. I found these evaluations to be much more comfortable, shifting the focus from opinions and personal feelings to observable demonstrations and achievements. This shift made it easier to celebrate wins collectively, fostering a sense of camaraderie and unity among the team throughout the evaluation process, a process that is historically vulnerable to creating a rift between managers and reports.
Unlike Dilbert’s Pointy-haired Boss, I was able to clearly and confidently speak to each designers strengths and opportunities! ©Dilbert 2018
Finally, armed with this robust structure, I was able to confidently answer the young designer's question, providing her not just with a valid response but also a well-defined pathway to realize her dreams. I was not only able to help her evaluate herself to see where she was today, but was also able to help her chart a course for the future. Since our career ladder was thoughtfully aligned to industry, she could be confident that the skills she’d learn with us would translate to any of her future employers, but she could also feel secure enough to know she had a future with us if she stayed.
In the end, our collaborative effort didn't just benefit our team; it became an example for others within the company. The career ladder we crafted provided more than a path for individual success; it became a blueprint for the collective growth and evolution of our entire design community.
