Establishing a growth framework for product designers at Potato
Why does your organisation need a growth framework?
A growth framework is an important tool for both organisations and employees to build a shared understanding of what competencies it needs to deliver on its mission. Designers in particular, with such an abundance of skills and competencies to choose from, must know what the organisation they work for values to make meaningful decisions about the direction of their personal growth.
The design growth framework is a component in a broader set of organisational competencies and skills, ranging from ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ to ‘ Growth and Change’. It’s part of our ambition to build an academy of product development professionals: we want those who join Potato to participate in and help shape industry-leading ways of working. When our ‘spuds’ leave, we want them equipped to lead ambitious product organisations with the skills they’ve developed at Potato.
The framework, therefore, is our product development corpus: a north star for employees looking to build competencies in the areas we believe to be integral for effective and purposeful product design; and an engagement tool for employees to track their progress and take charge of their personal growth. The latter is especially important: engaged employees are 59% less likely to seek out a new job or career in the next 12 months.
Defining what Potato values in designers
As an exercise in itself, building a career progression framework is a great way to determine if your community of practice (and your organisation) really knows what it expects from designers with different skill sets and levels of experience.
Sure, designers should be practising human-centred design (HCD) but are there implicit behaviours that the organisation would benefit from making explicit? What do we expect of an experienced practitioner compared to someone just starting out in the field? Working through these questions can often reveal gaps in alignment: it’s vital to bridge these before launching or risk frustrating teams with mixed messages and confusing language.
The creation of a framework also surfaces the opportunity to collaborate over the expectations of other disciplines too. Specifically, what design leadership values should dovetail with what other communities of practice value. For example, if engineering is crying out for designers who can prototype in code but design hasn’t specified this as an explicitly valued skill set, this is a missed opportunity to meet a business need with the personal ambition of an employee.
Helping designers ‘own’ their growth with a clear path for progression
Career frameworks are not a stick for leadership to beat their teams over the head with. Instead, it should be a liberating rubric that allows designers to set a course for their own goals and aspirations.
The expectations of the employee should be clear and evidence-driven at each step. At Potato, our competency levels (more below) comprise of two parts: a general description and an accompanying ‘evidence’ requirement. The latter is a more explicit set of activities, skills or behaviours we expect the designer to have demonstrated. Of course, conversations around the veracity of the ‘evidence’ are still an important part of our review process: a framework should never replace the need for human evaluation and sound judgement.
The framework has proved particularly valuable in our biannual review process and more frequent one-to-ones. Designers have been able to have much more meaningful conversations about their growth by being able to literally point at what their ambitions are. As a result, leadership has been able to set much more effective goals and ensure the designer is offered the right opportunities and experiences to help achieve them.
“To have ‘something’ where there was nothing before has been a great aid to my awareness of my skills and where I land in the wider spectrum of competencies at Potato. Using this knowledge as a base, I’ve been able to chart a much clearer course for my personal development which, with the help of my community lead, is realistic and highly tailored to the path I want to pursue.”
Phil Demir, Designer
The ripples of the framework have been far reaching: writing job specifications has become a much more efficient and focused exercise. We’re now able to map very precisely what we’re looking for in a particular new hire to the appropriate competency level. This means when a new designer joins us at Potato, we’ve got a good sense of their position within the framework and from the get-go and can start having purposeful discussions around their desired growth path immediately.
What do Potato design competencies look like?
Potato’s career framework for designers is built around five core competencies: method, rationale, creativity, insight and execution. Each design competency has 7 levels of competency; each competency level comprises of a general description and a more explicit, ‘evidence’ section.
Our design competencies encompass what we believe to be the definitive measures of an effective and purposeful product designer:
Method
Great user experiences are the result of great processes. In this competency, we’re looking for designers to demonstrate their ability to design activities, processes and engagements that help their team uncover and continuously deliver user and business value. In particular, we’re looking for evidence that designers are living and breathing collaborative, divergent and empathetic methodologies like Design Thinking and Lean UX.
Rationale
Constraints and compromises are natural — and arguably welcome — bed-fellows of purposeful product design. Without them, we lack boundaries and focus, often turning our products into feature-rich, low-value time sinks. We expect product designers at Potato to embrace this tension and successfully navigate discussions around product viability (business needs), feasibility (tech constraints), and desirability (user needs) with their teams and clients.
Creativity
Creativity at Potato is more than beautiful visual design, illustration and interfaces: creativity is medium-agnostic, it’s learnable, and it’s a habit. We’re looking for designers that can synthesise a range of related (or disparate) stimulus and offer new, compelling ways of improving user experiences. This could be components for a new design system; strategies for a new customer touchpoint in a system blueprint; or the development of new utterance logic for a voice UI.
Insight
Quality insight from the right people, at the right fidelity, drives effective decision-making in product design: from a roughly workshopped list of stakeholder assumptions to a fifty page ethnographic field research report, a designer at Potato should be able to plan, participate in and execute a range of insight gathering activities in the pursuit of effective solutions.
Execution
Purposeful outcomes come with a focused awareness of the things you do - the actions you take, the things you deliver - to achieve that outcome. Quality execution is the result of our attention to detail, efficiency and consistency. We place great value on these characteristics at Potato since they impact not only what we deliver but how our client partners perceive us.
It’s worth mentioning that the competencies are deliberately role agnostic. That is to say, we’ve avoided building our competencies around traditional roles like ‘UI design’, ‘Interaction design’, or ‘UX research’. We hire designers at Potato: ‘T-shaped’ practitioners who we expect to fulfil the minimum requirements (appropriate to their level of seniority) of every design competency. Beyond there, however, they can choose to grow in any direction they wish.
For example, the competency scoring for a designer with strong UI or Interaction design skills might look something like the visual example below:
With nearly 20 designers from across our three studios in London, Bristol and San Fransisco using the framework, we’ve been able to quickly gather feedback and iterate on the initial version we launched in Autumn 2018.
Our big ambition is to open source our career framework and help other teams overcome the same problems we have. Watch this space!
Big thanks to Raymond Manookian, Product Design Director in our London studio, for his vital contributions and Nico Carey, Product Design Director in our San Fransisco studio, for setting the vision and bringing it to life!
