Evolving Our Product Design Ladder
aka Product Design Roles V4
We recently updated our Product Design Roles documentation. It’s been a few years since our last big change, and our team has evolved a lot in that time. The basis of our ladder remains strong — most of the core competencies have stayed the same, but we needed to update some language to reflect new technologies, responsibilities, and even new levels. After using the ladder for many review cycles, we knew there were gaps and that we needed to evolve the way it was written.
Problems we had
Cross-discipline leadership was not represented. While our existing ladder clearly outlines Product Designers’ contribution to leadership within the team, it didn’t reference the role designers were already responsible for in their cross-discipline groups. At BuzzFeed, teams are small and made up of a group of Product Managers, Engineers, and Designers — there are usually only one or two designers per group. This means designers take full ownership of their product area, collaborating with engineers on execution and with Product Managers on definition.
We had many references to “BuzzFeed” products. Since the ladder was originally written, the scope of brands, products and features our team works on is bigger than it’s ever been. This wasn’t being represented in the old ladder.
We lacked all of the levels needed for a team our size. Over the last two years, our team has nearly doubled. This means we have a need for more senior roles within the team to support internal growth, as well as the management layer that has sprung up to support our team of 19 designers.
Changes we made
We cleaned up language across the board, making parts more clear and less subjective, as well as removed unnecessary repetition between skills. We added clarification to outline leadership within a Product Designers’ cross-discipline group which acknowledges work our team is already doing.
In the past two years, BuzzFeed has merged with and acquired a couple of new properties, all now housed under one BuzzFeed, Inc. Our designers now work across many products — BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed News, Tasty, HuffPost, Complex, and all internal tools that support each of these brands. With that in mind, we expanded references to our entire product suite beyond just BuzzFeed.
In addition to those language changes, we also added a number of new levels. On the individual contributor ladder we added a Principal level, now our highest level. On the management ladder, we better differentiated between the Manager and Senior Manager level, as well as added a Director and Senior Director level.
That’s it!
You can find all of our updates on our github, including our new Tech-wide documentation on BuzzFeed’s Tech values. Next, we’ll be tackling our UX Research ladder, a new(ish) discipline for us at BuzzFeed to build out.
If you have any questions, feedback, or just like to talk about career ladders, reach out to me @kelsa_ on twitter 👋
Special thanks to Allison Krausman, Alison Zack, and Elaine Dunlap for all of their work making this ladder work for our team.
