Growth in our UX team: Job Descriptions, Competency Matrix and Career Paths
Yara Digital Ag Solutions (DAS) UX team’s frameworks to enable clear growth opportunities in Research, Content and Design roles
Inmaculada Ortiz Montiel is Yara Digital Ag Solutions’ (DAS) first Design Ops Lead. In her role, she makes sure designers have the time to design, while she handles everything else. Davide Vignes is a Design Lead. He leads his teams to craft great user experiences for digital farming.
🗺️ Context: Growing the UX team and filling in the gaps
If you’ve read my other articles, you’ll have an idea of how Yara Digital Ag Solutions’ (DAS) UX team is structured, as well as the changes we underwent in recent months.
If not, here’s the long story short:
Our UX team grew from 10 to 100. We went from 4 offices working independently, to 10 locations working as a global team. Through this, we brought previously dispersed teams with different ways of working together; we created new functions like ResearchOps and DesignOps; we created more career opportunities for our team.
One of the projects to support this growth is the Job Descriptions, Competency Matrix and Career Paths project — as the UX team grows larger and more specialised, we saw a need to define and standardise the Job Descriptions for each role. We need to understand where each role sits within the team, roles that are missing, and the expectations we have of each role.
We also wanted to give the UX team greater transparency when it comes to career opportunities and growth paths. For example, if a Designer is hoping to be promoted a Lead Designer, it is important that they know what the responsibilities are, and the goals they have to achieve.
The Competency Matrix and the Career Path definitions helps create this transparency. These aren’t just beneficial for current team members, but new joiners and job applicants as well, who place an emphasis on career progression and growth opportunities.
While Competency Matrix and Career Path definitions are not new to large UX teams, our challenge was making them work for DAS’ context, organisation structure, and present and future team needs.
Here’s how we went about building the Job Descriptions, Competency Matrix and Career Path definitions:
📋 Task 1: Streamline Job Descriptions
After reviewing the history of job descriptions (JDs) from the different DAS country teams, we defined an initial list of how many positions/seniority levels the team should have (which will continue to evolve).
We agreed that a JD should have these basic elements:
- Definition of the role;
- List of responsibilities;
- List of necessary skills.
The main challenge was to keep the JDs as generic as possible. Because even though our team is operating globally, there will be locally-specific needs. By leaving it open to customisation, we made sure that the JD could be tweaked to suit specific situations.
⚙️Task 2: Create a Competency Matrix from scratch
We outlined all the different roles from Intern/Trainee, all the way up to Senior Leadership.
The roles are: Intern/Trainee, Junior/Associate, Mid-Level Designer, Senior Designer, Principal Designer, Design Program Manager, Principal Lead Designer, Hub Manager.
We referred to other companies’ JDs and their descriptions, and adapted the requirements to fit the DAS UX team’s structure.
Next, we described each role according to a set of general characteristics that are common to all UX functions, including Design, Content and Research. These characteristics define: the scope of each role; its impact on the processes; the extent of the leadership; whether they are assigned to specific projects or work across multiple products; and so on.
While doing this, the biggest challenges we faced were:
- Defining the differences between the different levels of management (Principal Designer/Design Program Manager/Principal Lead Designer); and
- Defining the Senior role — in DAS, Senior positions are involved in hands-on work, but may also lead projects and guide less experienced teammates.
🤷♀️ What are the differences between the JD and the Competency Matrix?
A JD is a detailed description of hard and soft skills one needs to perform their role effectively. It can also be adjusted according to current needs. For example, if we need someone who’s stronger in UI rather than Interaction Design, the Job Description will be adapted.
On the other hand, the Competency Matrix describes, at a slightly higher level of abstraction, how one’s skills are applied in the context of our organisation. For example, as a Senior Designer, one requires certain leadership capabilities. The Matrix clarifies how one will apply these skills within the context of our team.
Another difference is that JDs are specific to each function, while the Matrix accounts for all of them.
Both the JD and Competency Matrix had to be developed simultaneously, and complement each other.
👨👨👧 Who in the UX team should use the Competency Matrix?
- Line Managers: They use it to assess their direct reports’ expected performance and plan the path for growing into a new role. The Matrix is used to guide and set expectations.
- All team members: Everyone can and should refer to the Matrix to understand the career opportunities available across the UX team, and to self-assess their competencies.
- Hiring Managers: They can refer to the Matrix to assess candidates and define the JDs.
The Matrix can be enriched with Yara and DAS’ Learning and Development plans. These plans suggest resources, such as learning pathways, trainings and online courses, that team members can use to grow in their current role, or prepare for a more senior or different role. For example, soon-to-be managers might attend specialised courses or get a mentorship.
🌱 Task 3: Document the existing Career Paths
Finally, we worked on defining what “growth” looks like, and the different career paths that are open to the UX team.
In DAS, growth is not necessarily a synonym for promotion. Growth is the journey by which you can acquire new skills, try new challenges and extend the scope of your work. Of course, in many cases, this will also translate into stepping up into a new, more senior position.
We defined two kinds of Career Paths: Technical and Managerial.
The Technical Career Path is focused on improving technical expertise. Team members in this path become highly specialised in a set of hard skills and will have limited leadership responsibilities. They might lead other designers in a project team but their main focus is getting the best outcome from the people within the project.
The Managerial Career Path, on the other hand, is for those who are more inclined to working with people, helping them grow in their careers, and making sure the team has all it needs to function at our best.
🧪 Conclusion
Developing the JDs, Competency Matrix and Career Paths was a very challenging but incredibly useful exercise, especially at this juncture in time.
With a new global structure and reassignments in the team, we had team members who had been moved to new positions with new responsibilities. How could and can we continue to help them do their jobs?
Through this exercise, we discovered the gaps in our team; provided more clarity to our team members on their accountability and potential growth; improved transparency with the rest of the organisation; and set consistent standards across our global teams.
