Growth System @Luko Engineering

Luko is a fast-growing startup. We have been aggressively growing our team in the past 2.5 years to ensure the needed capacity and skills to support over 320 000 customers of Luko. Our goal is to provide excellent services to more than 1 000 000 customers in 2023.

A few years ago when Luko was a small team it was easy to help our engineers grow in an informal way without any tools. With an engineering team of over 20 people this became a little challenging as more engineers are at a different level and the need for more formal reference point of one’s professional level arises. About a year ago, we identified this need via the feedback from our engineers and engineering managers.

In this article we will share our thought process, the Growth System, and our take aways from the implementation.

What are our needs?

First we had to formulate what we would like to achieve with a growth system.

• Provide a reference point for all Luko engineers to where they are today and all the options they need to grow
• Enable personal growth recognising the development of technical and soft skills that are usually ignored (recruitment, mentorship, evangelism, and more)
• Allow everyone to grow as they see fit as an individual contributor or a manager
• Fosters a personal growth conversation between individuals and their managers using the same framework and as much as possible data
• Enable a more objective way of people’s skills evaluation based on the same framework of expectations

How did we build the system?

We were clear that we are not the only company facing this problem and that there are many career ladders and growth systems developed by other companies that are publicly accessible (references at the end). We had the option to build a system from scratch or to build on top of the work of other companies that have successfully deployed such systems. We took the opportunity to explore the work of other tech companies and find something that will work well for us after adaptation.

We liked very much the engineering growth rubric developed by Medium because it allows us to respond to all five aforementioned needs. It required an adaptation to cover our engineering skills needs. We extended the system to fit our needs at Luko.

• Added specialisations such as hardware, firmware, mobile, data engineering, and machine learning along with more relevant for us examples of demonstrated skills and experience.
• Added a career ladder that mapped the expectations for the different levels in the organisation. This allowed us to be very explicit to what is expected at each level and allow Lukooms to provide feedback to engineers based on that.
• Created a visual tool that makes the mapping of skills much easier and more visual to do than in a google sheet. (it is continuously enhanced)
• Added the concept of growth OKRs for our people to develop personal objectives that align with their ambitions.
• Provided a set of supporting how-to documents providing the information all current and future engineers need in order to make good use of the model.
• Aligned the levels with our compensation model — Salary Grid.

Full disclosure: The writer of this blog post had used Medium’s growth rubric to implement a growth system at FindHotel, a great startup in Amsterdam. The work there was further improved and adjusted to the needs of Luko.

Luko Growth System

The result of our work is a Growth System with four components. Here we will provide a high-level overview of the system and if you are interested you can deep dive in the documentation following the links. We have made it public and available to anyone.

Growth Framework that outlines all the specialisations that an engineer at Luko can develop. Each specialisation is a description of a specific skillset. The specialisation have five milestones one can achieve that are defined by a clear description and three behavioural examples. As a feature of the framework the higher the milestone the more difficult it is to achieve as that will require more in-depth knowledge and larger scope of responsibilities. Consequently, achieving higher milestones is also more rewarding as it requires more effort but also adds more growth points to the total calculation that determines the level of anyone on the Career Ladder.

Career Ladder that sets the expectations for each level based on the specialisations’ milestones defined in the Growth Framework. This way we created a clear and direct relationship between what skills one can develop and how those skills map to the different levels on our ladder.

A visual tool that our engineers and their managers use to set the specialisations’ milestones that are used to compute the level of an individual engineer or manager. This tool was an initiative of one of our front-end engineers, Woolim Park. Thanks a lot for building the tool and making it much more fun to use the system than the initial Google Sheet! Later on more people started contributing. Many thanks guys!

A set of how-to’s documents that helped our people use the Growth System. We observed that providing such written information in combination with introductory sessions and workshops enabled a smoother adoption of the Growth System.

What are our take aways from the implementation?

When reusing and expanding on the great work of others, probably the biggest challenge is the implementation. A system might work in one place and not in another and even if well adapted it might not work if the implementation fails. Here we share our approach and what worked well for us that might also work well for other companies.

• It is important to evaluate the company’s needs in terms of skills and experience to emphasise in the system. This will drive the culture and allow specific growth opportunities for all people. We wanted to emphasise that all skills and contributions to the growth and success of the Luko are recognised and we help people develop them. Hence, we applied an equal weight to skills such as evangelism, recruitment, mentorship and all engineering domains. We transitioned from engineering titles such as “Senior Front-end Engineer” to just “Senior Engineer” emphasising that one can develop different engineering skills throughout their career and this knowledge will be equally recognised.
• Collect feedback from many of the people impacted by the change. Many engineers will not have experience with such systems and possibly not a strong opinion about them. At the same time, keeping everyone part of the discussion creates awareness and an opportunity to go along with the entire change process.
• Communicate a clear implementation plan that contains all main steps and how the success of the growth system will be measured. Transparency is key when such a large change is being introduced and key to help everyone follow the progress.
• Introduce such a system right after a planned people evaluation session. It is important to let people finish an evaluation cycle with whatever model (or no model) is in place and only after that kick off the new one. Why? Well, it is fair to not evaluate your team against something that they haven’t seen at the start of the evaluation cycle.
• Provide everyone with the opportunity to evaluate themselves against the new system and discuss their level with their managers. The managers will have prepared an evaluation for each of their people as well. During those conversations there will be some disagreements that can be effectively used to discuss ways to close the gaps. This makes everyone really part of the process and being in control of their growth in the company.
• Prepare as much as possible supporting documentation to help people easily adopt the system. This is key to enable the people to work independently. We prepared documentation outlining how people can evaluate themselves on the new system, how to think about their career, how to identify good growth OKRs, hypothetical examples of how different profiles can be developed using the system, and more.
• Introduce the system in sessions with small groups of up to 15 people and preferably from the same team. In smaller groups people tend to be more focused and more open to ask questions. We started with an alignment session with all engineering managers (EM) and kicked off sessions with each of the EM’s teams. Our EMs did the introduction for their teams and we were there to support when needed during the Q&A. We kept notes and compiled a Q&A page for everyone to be able to go back and check the information. We also did ad-hoc sessions based on people’s feedback to provide further information and clarifications. We also opened a Slack channel for questions but that didn’t really become very active. People mostly interacted directly with their managers.
• Embed the system as early as possible into the recruitment process. This is key to having all candidates evaluated the same way as they will be once in the company. The difference is that for people in the company there are more reference points for such evaluations. We found that it is possible to collect enough data points as part of the interview process to have a very accurate evaluations. We adjusted the structure of our interviews and aligned on what data points we collect at each step helping us determine a candidate’s seniority according to the Growth System. This process has proven to be quite accurate.
• Once the system is introduced, implement it as part of your onboarding process. This provides clear expectations to the new joiners as they have a reference to what it means to be at a certain level.
• If possible, make all levels available to everyone in the company. We believe that this is important to provide a reference point to everyone to what it means to be at a certain level. The senior people are an example of the qualities and experience that is recognised by the system. Hence, a good design of the system will drive the values and principles that a company would like to foster.
• Hold people and managers accountable for the development of their growth plans and achieving them. This allows everyone to focus on the process of personal development and growth in the company. We use OKRs across the company and we added OKRs related to people development to all engineering managers.
• Align the career levels with the company’s compensation model. A good approach is to evaluate all people against the new system. After that calculate their compensation based on the alignment between the system and the compensation model. In case there are too many outliers, it is good to evaluate if the two systems are well aligned. Eventually, it should be possible to achieve a small number of outliers and make a plan on how to deal with them. This will usually be some form of legacy and should be dealt with asap.
• Some of our engineering managers asked their people to evaluate them on the growth system to determine their level. It was a fun exercise and we observed that it increased the trust and transparency between engineers and managers. We loved it and recommend it to everyone that implements such a system.

This approach helped us execute a very successful implementation at Luko. Here we are sharing some of the results of our internal survey that evaluates the level of understanding and adoption of the system. The participation in the survey was 75%.

As you can see below not everything was perfect but we have collected great feedback that we are using to further improve the system and the support we provide to our team.

We learnt from the feedback that our team would like to have:

• in the tool features such as import and export, direct redirect to the specialisations and storing the configuration in the URL
• more behavioural examples per milestone level
• career level real-life examples at Luko
• growth OKRS (this is our personal growth plan) examples
• a more relevant specialisation for the Data Analytics team
• and a bunch more

Most of the feedback is already acted upon and some of it we will have to still work on. For instance, we enhanced the visual tool, we added a separate track for the Data Analytics team that will be soon adopted, we had additional workshops on Growth OKRs, and we are still to work on providing even more behavioural examples.

It is a continuous process and we will continue performing such surveys and learning from the team what further we should improve.

References

As a foundation for our Growth System we took Medium’s Growth Rubric and the work done at FindHotel (Growth Model) and adjusted them to the needs of Luko. So, far that happen to be a well-working solution and we will continue improving it and share our future learnings after two more evaluation periods.