Creating your startup’s career ladder
As a founder at a scrappy young startup, “create career ladder” barely even ranks on the list of things that Need To Happen Yesterday. It’s far, far below, hire great people, onboard them faster, and set the org up to scale—which is a shame, since creating your career ladder will help with all three.
Think about it. By clearly defining roles (current or planned):
- your job descriptions are already mostly written
- new employees clearly understand what’s expected of them in their current role—and in order for them to advance
- you’ve outlined a framework of growth for the org
You’re also in a better spot to run more objective performance and compensation reviews, which may or may not be on your list—but both very good problems to address early.
So, maybe it’s time to shuffle some priorities. And we’re going to make it really easy—at least on the technical side of the house. Drawing inspiration from levels shared by Spotify and Etsy, the career levels we defined for our development organization at Koan were lightweight and generic enough to fit the changing needs of our early-stage team. There’s a decent chance they might work for you, too!
Career levels at Koan
At the top of our ladder, we share the motivation for having levels (even at our early stage) and principles for assessing individuals’ performance at each level.
Motivation
Personal growth is an important goal for our development team at Koan. While abstractions like “growth” are hard to quantify, this document outlines our expectations for developers at different levels in their careers with the intent of supporting more equitable, objective hiring and advancement.
Principles
Levels are cumulative. Advancement to a new level builds on those before it, raising the bar across four focus areas:
- The technical and domain expertise the developer contributes to the team and organization
- The developer’s leadership, as demonstrated by initiative and influence
- The positive impact a developer has on our customers, codebase, and stakeholders within the organization.
- And ultimately, delivery of assigned features and projects
Base levels
Associate Developer
Associate developers are individual contributors (ICs) focused on individual output and personal growth. They contribute to team initiatives while honing their skills in collaboration with other team members.
Impact
- Ships features with end-user impact
Expertise
- Proficient in core technology stack
- Proactively addresses defects (bugs and quality) in own work
- Operates within established norms and processes
Leadership
- Maintains awareness of team discussions
- Demonstrates growth mindset and commitment to self-improvement
Delivery
- Delivers features and bugfixes with modest support and guidance from other team members
- Collaborates with other team members to ensure quality
Developer
Developers are well-versed in our existing practices and systems, helping the team deliver key initiatives while continuing to expand their skillset.
Impact
- Regularly ships features with end-user impact
- Earns recognition and trust of adjacent teams
- Completes work without adding complexity
Expertise
- Understands tech stack and deployed ecosystem
- Fields and troubleshoots on-call incidents and high-priority issues
Leadership
- Contributes to technical and architectural decision-making
- Participates in hiring at all stages of our candidate pipeline
Delivery
- Independently delivers features that support team’s deliverables
- Provides technical and professional mentorship to other members of the team
Senior Developer
Senior developers use their experience and familiarity with our codebase to deliver thoughtful, maintainable solutions to significant implementation and operating challenges.
Impact
- Creates solutions that reduce complexity in the system as a whole
- Coordinates and delivers projects with significant cross-team impact
Experience
- Owns specific features, applications, and technologies within the ecosystem
- Maintains a comprehensive view across systems
- Anticipates and preempts failure states and bottlenecks
- Draws on significant experience to help solve problems in adjacent domains
Leadership
- Removes significant barriers to team progress
- Leads by example, setting high standards for the rest of the team
- Evangelizes team practices and technical decisions
Delivery
- Collaborates with cross-functional stakeholders to define and execute strategic initiatives
- Defines and delivers projects involving one or more additional team members
Branching levels
From here, the levels diverge into a management track and a technical track with no direct people-management responsibilities.
Principal Developer (tech track)
Principal developers take our team to the next level while raising our development organization’s profile in the community at large
Impact
- Solves problems impacting the broader development community
Experience
- Creates leverage through identification and implementation of new core technologies
- Resolves longstanding issues between teams and services
Leadership
- Evangelizes development efforts within the organization and community
- Proposes and leads projects of wide community interest
Delivery
- Helps team plan and deliver large, technically complex issues on time
- Researches and implements significant technical changes within reasonable time constraints
Engineering Manager (management track)
Engineering managers help their teams deliver critical objectives by developing capabilities, resolving obstacles,
Impact
- recognizes and clears technical and process roadblocks facing their team
- coordinates with stakeholders in adjacent and dependent teams (e.g. sales, marketing, etc)
- primary contact (and source of feedback) for their team
Expertise
- conversant in tools and technologies used by their team
- familiar with tools used by adjacent teams (e.g. Jira and Figma)
Leadership
- direct responsibility for team of individual contributors
- owns definition and adherence to team KPIs
- fosters collaboration and inclusion in team’s daily work
- supports team member growth and development
- hires great people within the team
Delivery
- delivers significant projects in support of engineering roadmap
- owns quality, performance, and efficiency of team’s work
- contributes to hiring and process development
Director of Engineering (management track)
Impact
- owns performance across a significant engineering function
- draws on engineering insight to inform company-wide strategy
Expertise
- meaningful hands-on experience building software systems
- familiar with key tools and technologies used within their function
- understands (able to triage) the systems and services they oversee
Leadership
- direct responsibility for team of managers
- guides their function in support of company goals
- responsible for growth and competence of their organization
- helps managers set and maintain team goals
- hires great managers while orchestrating multiple teams’ growth plans across organization
Delivery
- delivers complex projects involving multiple teams
- owns KPIs (growth, retention, uptime, etc) within their function
That’s it: our early-stage career ladder. If you don’t have your own ladder defined yet, you’re welcome to borrow, remix, or extend these under the terms of the ISC License. And if you do, bravo! You’ve done a good thing for your current employees—and for everyone that joins on as you grow.
We’ll be cheering you on!
