Square’s ECOM Design Career Hub
Take a tour of the doc that Jenny uses to boost her design team’s professional growth
Swimming in Drive
Jenny Emick, a Design Lead at Square, was searching for a better way to manage her team’s professional development when she discovered Coda. A colleague had been using Coda to organize documentation related to Design Engineering, and Jenny thought that Coda might be helpful for professional development as well.
“Before Coda, we had notes all over the place: Google Docs, Apple Notes, Google Sheets, Slides presentations — things were all swimming around in Google Drive.”
What started as a simple place to add 1:1 agenda items and meeting notes has evolved into the hub for Square’s eCommerce designers to manage all the minutiae, as well as big-picture elements, of their career development.
And while the doc has grown in size, it hasn’t grown in complexity — it’s still a wonderfully simple doc. More teams are utilizing Jenny’s template, and she believes that the simplicity of the doc is key to its adoption.
Enter the Career Development Hub
The doc combines several elements that are necessary for an employee and their manager to work collaboratively on their career development.
Overview
This is the first section — it enables a manager to introduce themselves and their approach to management, and for the direct report to fill out their Operating Principles, or areas that the direct report and manager agree are critical for communication.
1:1 Notes
This is the most often used part of the doc — for weekly meetings between the employee and their manager.
The section is structured with intro text, explaining the style of the meeting and how it should be run. It also has a table for entries for each week, where the manager and direct report can capture both notes, and action items.
By using a table instead of the freeform text editor, it’s easier to archive and filter out old entries so the section doesn’t get cluttered as the weeks go by.
Development Plan
Every quarter, employees update their own personal goals in this section. The doc provides some guideline areas, but each employee creates goals that are uniquely their own, helping them feel more invested in achieving them. Then, every so often the manager and direct spend their weekly 1:1 meeting assessing each goal to make sure the employee is progressing in areas they committed to focus on.
The development plan also includes a simple summary of the employee’s hiring stats — manager, date hired, etc. — as a reference point.
Hype Doc
This is the je ne sais quoi of the Career Development Hub, a place that’s just for the employee to collect bits and bobs of feedback, self reflection, and accomplishment to highlight for their manager (a topic Squares, as they are known, have thought a lot about). It’s a repository, of sorts, and should be added to at random, when things come up. Jenny encourages everyone on her team to add to their hype docs regularly.
“At Square we have a saying that you’re the owner of your career, you should be the person to hype yourself. So I wanted to encapsulate that in a doc, to make it tangible. Employees will go in and add all the cool stuff they’re working on — Slack screenshots of praise, etc.”
She calls it a ‘doc’ because that’s how Square often refers to Sections in Coda — as “docs within docs.” One of the biggest benefits of using Coda at Square is simply eliminating all the other docs that are floating around.
Learning Resources
Finally, there’s a section for the employee to access resources that build their skillsets, including modules from Skillshare, Lynda.com, and MasterClass. There’s a calendar view here so the employee can see when certain classes are coming up, and be reminded to register for them.
Oh and by the way, the doc works great on mobile too. So employees can add last minute notes to the doc on the way to their next 1:1 meeting.
Create your own copy of Square’s Career Development Hub, then customize it for your team.
