Designing Inclusive Career Ladders within UX
As a lead design program manager within Salesforce’s UX organization, my customers are my coworkers. Instead of improving the working experience of Salesforce’s customers and end users, I focus on improving experiences for my colleagues who span multiple product spaces and UX-based disciplines.
I am lucky to work with a wide variety of people, each with their own passions, backgrounds, and skill sets. I get to witness these people bring their whole selves to work, share ideas, give feedback, and discover shared frustrations as we work toward common goals. Being able to work with such a diversely talented group of people motivates me to support them individually in their career growth here at Salesforce.
But career growth can show up in different ways. Which means an inclusive approach to career development is essential to supporting equity in our organization.
At a grassroots level, many people in Salesforce’s UX organization have been advocating for (and implementing) diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. In 2021, our chief design officer, Justin Maguire, listed DEI as his top priority for our organization. So, with passionate support from leadership, we are committed to shaping a working environment that promotes and enables a diverse employee base, and fosters a strong sense of belonging.
DEI is ongoing work that requires consistent attention and reexamination–especially at the tactical level. It can’t be done all at once, nor is the work ever really finished. It’s a lens we need to use to assess everything from the products we make, to the ways we communicate, to the ways we empower employees to grow. One way we’ve sought to operationalize our commitment to DEI is through specific changes to our career ladder, which we call the “Product UX Career Competencies.”
What are career competencies?
Career competencies are a tool we use to assess the skills and performance of our UX practitioners. The tool lays out a progressive set of criteria that help guide conversations between employees and their managers about goals, learning, and career development.
Currently, these criteria show up in a spreadsheet that everyone can access. The sheet holds details for four of the design disciplines within our organization: UX design, UX engineering, UX operations, and people management.
Each role has levels beginning at associate and building up to vice president. Within each level, there are six skills categories. Examples of these categories include communications, leadership, and design logic.
How are career competencies used?
To kick off a career conversation using the competencies, an employee will assess themselves at their current level (say senior designer) and the level above (such as lead designer). They’ll share that assessment with their manager, who will then assess the designer against the same individual attributes.
Afterward, they’ll hold a meeting together, where the conversation may highlight:
- Top attributes.
- Opportunities for improvement.
- How the manager might support development.
- Differences between the two assessments.
It’s important to note that our competencies are not a checklist for promotion. We don’t expect employees to get top scores across their level in order to advance. Plus, the operations team is committed to annual refreshes to ensure our competencies continue to be accurate and reflect any changes in the industry.
How does DEI relate to the career competencies?
In general, our competencies tool helps reduce bias in career conversations by offering common guidelines to managers across teams and disciplines.
Because competencies can hold a lot of power for career growth at Salesforce, this framework felt like it could benefit from an additional inclusivity lens. We want to ensure we are supporting all of our UXers appropriately as they go through this journey.
Here’s what managers in our organization had to share about how the career competencies help them support their employees:
- Staying Consistent: “Everyone across the organization is looking at a similar set of standards. These give me a balance for repeatable conversations over time with my team. And I know that other managers are doing similar things with their team.”
- Celebrating Individualism: “We’re all differently shaped humans, with different skills. Being mindful of equity and being inclusive of how people show up differently, makes it a tool that can flex, so we don’t have to deliver in the same way for everyone. We create a shared foundation, but everyone can deliver on it differently.”
- Considering Opportunities: “It’s a reflection back to me [as the manager]: Am I giving equal opportunities where I can elevate my team for visibility to demonstrate specific skills? We have the talent here. [Managers] need to give them the opportunities to show that they have it.”
But wow, there is so much we could do regarding DEI. What did we tackle first?
We focused on the following five principles:
Be clear: Sounds simple, right? We flagged possible misinterpretations and updated phrases to be more specific to the requirements. For example, rather than listing “uses soft skills,” which could mean many things, we’ve updated the phrase to “uses active listening.” The intention of each attribute should be straightforward and easy to understand. We were mindful of colloquialisms or slang, since they may not be widely understood in a global perspective.
Remove forms of ableism: Ableism is discrimination against people with disabilities. We want to be sure that the language we’re using to assess performance is not unintentionally prejudiced. For example, we updated “thinks on their feet” to read “can direct conversation with intelligent responses.” The revised statement is more specific in expectations and shifts from ableist language.
Beware of extroversion: We don’t want our UXers to feel like they have to fit into a certain personality type in order to succeed. An example of this would be the word “energy.” We updated our competencies to list the word “initiative,” because we feel you can show great initiative without needing to have a certain energy level behind it.
Value work from anywhere: Even before 2020, our UX team was expanding globally. We wanted to embrace distributed work, be mindful of this shift to virtual teams, and improve how we support one another when we’re not all in the same location. One example of the changes we made: “Adjusts working style to match partners’ needs and expectations…as well as working environment (for example, in virtual settings).” As we move toward a hybrid model with some members working from offices and others staying remote, it’s especially important for the language to acknowledge the circumstances.
Replace gender-coded words: Gender-coded words are biased toward one gender. Examples of words that may be masculine-biased include “logical,” “driven,” and “independent.” Words that may be feminine-biased include “collaborative,” “patient,” and “dependable.”
Research shows that these words consciously or subconsciously influence someone’s decision to apply to an open job description. Women felt that job listings with masculine-coded language were less appealing and they made them feel like they didn’t belong in those roles. Our competencies aren’t the same as job descriptions, but we want our people to be able to envision themselves at the next level. We used Gender Decoder to help us adjust our language to be more neutral in tone.
To be clear, gender-coded words aren’t good or bad and some are actually the most appropriate words for describing a given skill. “Lead” and “support” are prime examples. In cases where we couldn’t avoid gender-coded words, we tried to balance the use of masculine- and feminine-coded words.
Remember:
- When using our competencies, our employees aren’t expected to excel in every skill set. Rather, the competencies are meant to inspire conversations between employees and managers. This way, employees can ask for support in how to grow, and managers can offer suggestions where appropriate.
- Our competencies always have room to improve. We’re still gathering data and feedback on what we’ve delivered so far, and most importantly, we will always commit to future change.
If you’d like to learn more about applying DEI practices to your team’s culture, I recommend reading “How Design Ops Can Influence Your Team Culture” (helpful for all teams!) and completing the inclusive design module on Salesforce’s learning platform, Trailhead.
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Madeline Davis for her editing support and story direction. My Salesforce UXOps team, especially Jason Kriese and Rachel Posman. A few Salesforce UX’s DEI Council members who have supported competencies edits in the past, specifically: Donielle Berg, Patrick Chan, Noelle Moreno, Laura Cruickshanks, and Liz Fox. And Salesforce UX leadership for their commitment to DEI within our organization.
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