Side — Our approach to people progression

Julien Gauthier

Published in

in-Side

7 min readApr 29, 2019

Foreword

At the beginning of the year 2019, we released the first version of our career trajectory framework.

People are defining Side day after day by driving its operation and contributing to building its future in the long run. We consider them to be the heart of our company.

In our efforts towards creating a self-sustainable smart organisation, we asked ourselves how we could build a system that guides people toward self-improvement and higher impact. We built this system because the values we share and the alignment on our mission made it possible and necessary. It has a double benefit:

It makes sure that people joining Side know what to expect.
It helps people already here to define their career plan and reach their next level.

Notes:

“Insiders” are the people working at and for Side, employees
We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We found existing systems developed by others, took inspiration and adapted them to our case. Links to these are provided at the end of this article.
This system is only in use in the product team for the moment. At Side, the product team is composed of all the competencies needed to create a meaningful and robust product. You’ll find PM, Design, TechOps (PO, QA, DevOps), Engineering (web, mobile), Data, and their managers.

Approach & mindset

The more we grow, the more complexity arises. We want Side to keep its flexibility and its simple, yet impactful, approach. We strongly believe that we need to provide smart people with tools that are helping them focus on meaningful subjects, foster their creativity and leverage their autonomy. In France, career progression is often seen as a tense subject as it’s tied to remuneration. We won’t approach this subject in this post, but it’s just to say that we don’t want frustration to come out of this matter.

In order to avoid it, we needed to create a fair system that is understandable and predictable as well as accepted by everyone. Like with many other topics, when we need to create a system that we’ll provide employees with, we start by having a high-level approach:

Start by looking at what we already have.
Identify the working components, and the patterns they have in common
Normalize these patterns and express their benefits in the current context
Release the first working iteration
Start using what has been released and get feedback
Improve with the next iteration
Repeat 5 & 6 while making sure it’s still matching the context and the needs

We approached career trajectory asking the questions: What are the successful and common patterns that Insiders in our team are sharing? How can we normalize and foster these patterns?

The first version is currently being used and we are planning on improving it with the feedback we are getting from Insiders.

Here is our v1:

Base principles

Pillars

When we looked at Side’s expectations from a high point of view, we discovered that there were 3 pillars we want Insiders to improve on. These 3 pillars are not only about technical or managerial skills but also about breaking down in a clearer way how we expect Insiders to grow.

1st pillar — Output

Output is what Insiders are concretely producing, technically speaking. Are they experts in their fields or at the beginning of their expertise? It represents how far they can go and how much impact they’ll have through their expertise level.
Example: Insiders capable of contributing to Side’s features but needing supervision don’t provide the same output as Insiders capable of producing components that are used at an industry level without supervision.

2nd pillar — Scope & Ownership

Handling a broader scope and having more and more ownership is about taking care of increasingly impactful responsibilities or components. It’s something that not every Insider is capable of doing immediately and it could require some work.
Example: Insiders co-owning a unique project with a peer won’t have the same scope and ownership as Insiders that are fully owning and mastering multiple product areas at Side.

3rd pillar — Leadership & Values

How well is an Insider capable of translating Side’s mission, vision and strategy into concrete outputs.
How well is an Insider capable of showing the path to other Insiders, through achievements, components, processes as well as incarnating Side’s values.
Leading is about showing others the way towards a high impact output while following Side’s principles and values. The more you improve your leadership, the more people will follow your footsteps and mimic what’s good and expected, overall improving the output and impact of the teams.
Example: Insiders receiving guidance and mentoring don’t have the same leadership as Insiders providing this mentoring or bringing best practices to the team.

Equilibrium

We decided to transform these above pillars to scales with levels.

Since we are aiming at avoiding inconsistencies and creating a fair system, these levels are used following guidelines described below:

Lowest common denominator

The framework we built expects that Insiders grow on each of these scales, in a balanced way. Insiders having a high output with an even higher scope are great and appealing but that’s only the beginning of it. We’ll also expect high leadership and values leverage from them. In other words, their global evolution is limited by their lowest scale’s progression.

For instance, If output (level 8), scope & ownership (level 8) are higher than leadership & values (level 5) then leadership & values will be defining Insider’s seniority. If the Insider wants to reach the next level, he’ll “only” need to improve his leadership & values first.

Role specifics

We are considering each role in a different way. It clearly appears that we don’t expect the same evolutions for Product Managers compared to Android Developers.

We could expect higher leadership from a specific role where, for another role at the same “seniority”, we could expect a higher output.

Seniority

The above is used to address the seniority of each Insider. Seniority corresponds to a set of levels on each of the scales.

It means that reaching higher seniority equates to having, at least, every pillar at the lowest level of the sought seniority.

Rewarding good focus

We want to encourage people to focus on the right scale to grow in a meaningful way. By doing this, we are avoiding disproportionate progressions. For instance, an Insider capable of producing industry-level components (Output scale — highest level) but not capable of guiding a junior on specific learnings (Leadership scale — lowest level)on a small project, shouldn’t be possible.

As seniorities are represented as a range of levels on each scale, reaching the highest level of a range on one scale means that you shouldn’t focus on this scale anymore. You could, but we won’t reward it for the seniority you are at. Focusing on another scale that hasn’t been maxed for your seniority becomes more interesting for you and Side.

Technically, improving scales that are low compared to others will also improve compensation. Improving scales that are already higher than what’s required by the current seniority will only improve the salary when the next seniority is reached.

It also means that Insiders having the same role and the same seniority could have small gaps in their salaries.

Benefits

This framework already has multiple benefits and some others are to come:

First, as a manager by using an objective tool, it’s easier and faster to assess your team members’ impact and their next steps in their career path.
Insiders are starting to have more open discussions with their managers about their future at Side. They can set up a plan with their manager on how to reach their next step as, down the road when objectives are reached, Side will recognise and reward them.
We are avoiding bias in our compensation approach. No more case-by-case and specific-per-manager-per-employee approaches. It contributes to fairly reward the work being made as well. We avoid invisible work not being well rewarded and shiny work being too much.
It helps to hire. Managers can define a right package for a job offer using this framework. They can also rely on the framework while preparing a career path for a newly hiree straight from the beginning.
Finally, we are currently in the process of increasing the frequency of Insiders’ reviews. We do not aim at having an annual review with classic per year increases, we aim at being fair and compensate for the output when it’s here. Having trajectory discussions multiple times per year should be normal, acting upon it as well.

A constant improvement

People progression is a never-ending topic and must be approached as such.

We just released our first version and are already seeing great benefits that are motivating us to think about the future.

The already existing frameworks we inspired from (links below) are all sharing a mindset we like. They showcase their willingness to create something more accurate, open and most importantly, fair. That’s something we’ll keep in mind for our next iterations.

Resources

We are thinking about publicly releasing and explaining our scales as well. Do you think it could be relevant and interesting to you?

If you have any questions or feedback, we’ll be really glad to hear from you.

If you interested in Side and how we are building the future of work, feel free to look at our open job positions.

Thanks to Kassim, Hugo and Larissa for all your help on this article!