How we created a career progression framework for Product Designers & User Researchers at carwow
We’ve probably all been there before. Working at a small or medium-sized start-up (or even an established one) wondering how to take the next step in our career. Frustratingly, there is a lack of internal guidance or structure on how to progress.
What happens? Usually, you move to another company and take your career to the next level, or you stay and become increasingly unhappy in your role. Either way, the employer loses out in both cases.
According to LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report, a massive 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers. While it seems like a no-brainer, and despite the obvious importance of this subject, the majority of companies simply don’t invest enough time to create transparent structures on how everyone can develop and progress in a team.
When we started to think about how we can build a best-in-class Research & Design Team here at carwow we wanted to make sure that everyone had a clear route to progress their career.
In this article, I am going to take you through the process that we decided to create and evolve carwow’s Research & Design progression framework.
Start with the why
The first part of building our progression framework was to be clear on why we needed one. While a good progression framework can help answer the question “How do I progress my career?” and also improve performance and retention rates, there were many additional purposes that we wanted our framework to serve. Our framework was created to:
- Make it clear to everyone in the team (and even those outside it) what is expected of an individual at all levels
- Encourage meaningful discussions between employees and line-managers and guide personal development plans
- Encourage positive skills and traits amongst the whole team and bring consistency in performance
- Guide fair conversations during performance reviews and when hiring new team members
- Encourage a growth mindset by encouraging everyone to learn and develop new skills
When developing great products, we start with the why — so why should developing how career progression works be any different? Being clear on the goals and problems that we wanted to address was a great starting point as it allowed us to reflect at various points in the development process and assess if our original objectives were being met.
Don’t start from scratch
When we were taking the next steps to develop our progression framework, we had a bit of help. We began to talk to other departments within carwow to see if there were any processes or structures in place internally. Luckily, it turned out that our Engineering Team had already developed their own progression framework called ‘T.O.I.L.’ that we were able to use as a foundation.
In addition to this, we looked at how other companies structured their progression frameworks and the resource progression.fyi provided a list of some excellent examples of open source frameworks and career pathways from the likes of Monzo, Zendesk, and Intercom.
This gave us a great insight into what some of the typical traits that some great progression frameworks contained and gave us a clear starting point.
Group expectations into key skill areas
There are usually a lot of expectations for any given role, which is probably why most progression frameworks group expectations into skill areas. When reviewing our Engineering Team’s framework, expectations were grouped into four key skill areas. These were:
- Technical
- Ownership
- Impact
- Leadership
After reviewing if these key skill areas worked for us, we also decided to use ‘T.O.I.L.’ as our key skill areas. Using them not only allowed us to ensure that we were setting expectations in a wide range of skills, but it also started a consistent and aligned approach to progression within carwow’s Product Team.
Defining these skill areas was just the first part of developing the framework. To complete the document, we described our expectations for each level, from Junior to Head.
Reflect on the objectives
We launched version 1 of our T.O.I.L. framework in February 2019, and while it provided many benefits, the more we used it the clearer it became that it was not meeting the original goals and purposes that we had initially set out for it.
One of our original objectives was to encourage meaningful discussions between employees and line-managers and guide personal development plans; however, during these conversations, our framework wasn’t being as helpful as we would have liked.
The problem was simply that we weren’t granular enough in our expectations in the key skill areas. They were too vague to be actionable and assessed against.
How we evolved it
The solution for us? Go more in-depth. We started breaking down our key skill areas into sub-areas and aligning them with the way that we worked. For example, for our Product Designers, we took the key still ‘Technical’, broke it down and aligned it to our design process:
- Defining problems
- Outlining system and UX exploration
- UI & production
- Shipping work
- Using our design system
While this made our framework larger, which we originally wanted to try and avoid, breaking down the key skills in this way allowed us to align the sub-areas to our working processes and provide more guidance when both actioning and assessing expectations.
While this framework has proved to be beneficial for our team, we know that we will update and evolve it more from this point as our goals and needs change as a team.
We hope that if you’re looking to create a progression framework of your own or improve what you currently have, this may be a good starting point for you. And to help others, we’ve open-sourced the progression frameworks in our Research & Design Team — so copy, remix, and share.
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