Words matter
Our approach to career progression and reward at Wise
At the end of 2023, we released one career map for all of our multidisciplinary Design team, and moved our tiered salary to one equitable band. Here’s why and how we got there.
Context
Our growth throughout 2022 was pretty epic. The company doubled from roughly 2,500 to 5,000 people. Wise hired 63 designers, effectively quadrupling the team in a short time. We’d grown disciplines like Research and Content Design, and spun up completely new ones like DesignOps and Visual Design. None of our career frameworks or principles had been envisioned with this level of scale in mind, or for the seismic shift from design as a service to design as a strategic partner.
Josh, our VP of Design, assembled his leadership team, and in February 2023 we descended on balmy Edinburgh for a few days to figure out what to do now, next and in the future. (Also for a wicked night out, obvs). It was clear the team was hungry for some direction, something they could rally behind — and we were keen to create velocity.
The first draft of our new mission and principles poured out in a rush. It was pretty good, better once our Content Design Director Rob Macfie infused the language with inspiration and purpose.
If there’s one thing this process has taught me, it’s that words matter.
Rob and I were tasked to take the mission and principles forward, and to reimagine the career framework we’d outgrown. We were incredibly intentional with all of our language choices, and while it might have taken a while for these choices to gain momentum, now we’re fairly flying.
Identity.
We’d grown up at Wise as “Design,” but we now had five disciplines — content design, product design, research, visual design and ops. The challenge we had was that each discipline was self identifying in their own way, with no collective identity or sense of wider belonging. When people said “design” they often meant “product design” which like most tech companies, is the largest and most established discipline at Wise. It ostracised instead of unified. Rob and I threw a bunch of options out — Human Centred Design, User Experience Design, or just the acronym UXD, or Experience Design?
In the end we decided this was just different ways to pronounce potato 🥔 . Brain Chesky’s config talk “Leading through Uncertainty” had just dropped, and in a section he talks about being a designer, but not one people often think about. A designer of business models, org charts, narrative…and I’d really drunk that koolaid.
Rather than change a name, we opted to change perception. We embraced “Design” and made it inclusive. Our first principle is: Be a designer. Though we have different roles and work in different ways, human centred design is what unites us. A year on, and the vast majority, if not all of the team, identify proudly as designers. It took time, but it’s been hugely empowering.
Mission and Principles.
We released the mission and eight principles in March 2023.
Over time, the mission stuck but the team couldn’t remember that many principles. Frankly, neither could the leaders who created them. If your principles aren’t memorable — they’re useless. Later, we cut it down to five principles — I’ll explain why a bit later on.
We also held our first Design Day event at the Barbican in September 2023. We called the event Light the Path, and structured the content around our mission and principles. Exposing the whole team to the thinking, and immersing them in the new language, created the connection we needed. It showed everyone how far we’d come and how committed we are to each other, our mission and the opportunities that lay ahead.
Aims
We set out our stall in what we were trying to achieve, which was to create a career framework that is:
- Comprehensive. As simple as it could be, as complex as it needed to be.
- Progressive. Aspirational guidance rather than detailed, tick-boxy checklist.
- Universal. Relevant, inclusive and useful for our multidisciplinary Design team.
(Yes, we adopted the framework from Neilson Norman’s design maturity model because — nerds 🤓).
A “universal” framework was a source of debate. At this point, we’d gathered at least a dozen competency frameworks from all over — AirBnB, Spotify, Uber, Amazon, etc — and most were bespoke for each discipline. This created a complex and vast matrix of spreadsheets and really encouraged the tick box exercise.
I was convinced that if our first principle was to “Be a Designer,” and we wanted to avoid checklists, then we should be able to create one framework that worked for everyone and could scale. It took quite a bit of convincing, but the sceptics conceded we could give it a shot.
Skills.
At the heart of a career framework is “competencies”, but I’ve always disliked that word in this context. “Competent” is transactional and cold, the opposite is “incompetent”. No one wants to be that. Rob and I were keen on using “skills’’ instead. It’s warmer, richer, more aspirational. We wanted to have conversations about developing, growing and learning skills, rather than levelling competency.
We worked with leadership and a couple of our fantastic researchers to identify new skill categories in our spring 2023 performance evaluation cycle. The team was receptive to the four skills we’d agreed on — craft, strategy, impact and influence. There was room to improve, but through testing and survey feedback we received strong signals we were headed in the right direction.
One skill was missing though, so we added it when we did the full Career Map. We don’t do design managers at Wise. All of our managers — or Leads, as we call them — are expected to be ICs who also have management responsibilities. Not managers who occasionally dabble in IC responsibilities.
Leadership is a skill. It can come from anywhere, from anyone at any time, and we wanted to make sure we emphasised this.
The Career Map.
We got properly underway in June, and we released in October.
Getting started was overwhelming. I still shudder when I think of the colossal Figjam Rob and I poured over for this project.
The first month Rob and I felt like we were bouncing a ball into space and getting nothing back. It was so easy to fall into the trope of discipline specific checklists. I doubted my conviction that we could make one universal frame for all of Design. False starts, loop backs and dead ends.
Then I had a brain wave. “Rob, I’ve got something.”
We’d been looking at the skills in isolation, with the mission and the principles just kinda listed around them without integration. What if we intentionally mapped a design principle onto a skill — because after all, it’s not just what you do (the skill), it’s how you behave (the principle) and why (the mission)?
“Sounds bloody difficult…I’m in.”
First, we had to kill our darlings. Rob and I cut the principles down from eight to five. We removed similarities, paired with a skill, and cut any platitudes that felt like a company wide value, not a guiding thought on how to behave as a designer at Wise specifically. The day the map and its three core parts — the mission, the skills, and the principles — fit onto one slide, Rob and I high-fived. Check mate.
From there, it was a hard slog of defining every skill and principle, and laboriously working through each level to ladder the skills. For this, Rob is truly the mastermind and no amount of praise can really sum up my awe. While he wrestled with that task, I focussed on the other significant piece of the puzzle.
Reward.
If we were going to assess every discipline, with the IC and Lead track on one framework then we needed to make sure our reward strategy reflected this shift. Companies often don’t publish their salaries transparently (internally or externally). They often pay managers more than ICs — incentivising people with no natural inclination to chase the manager track. They also pay product design more than any other design discipline,creating a feeling of inequity amongst peers.
Wise is different. We have a long history of publishing all of our salary bands transparently with job ads, as well as providing the full picture internally. We have one salary band for ICs and Leads, so managers aren’t paid more than their IC colleagues. We did have a tiering system in the disciplines though, which I set out to change to one band.
We’re led by the market, so I’d been working with our star recruiter Conor Hynes for most of 2023 to gather recruitment insights. Rejected offers from Wisers, exit data from leavers, recruitment data from folks who passed at first stage and cited reward as an issue — these are all inputs you need to gather over time to make a case like this.
Coupled with our employee engagement survey data and a detailed cost analysis, I put together a business case with Josh and we were ultimately successful. (Reward’s comment: “Oh my gosh, no one has ever actually used the business case template we created. This is great!”) The business case again was an exercise in choosing our words very carefully, and crafting a strong rationale backed by data. I’m not going to say there weren’t a few (very) sweaty moments, but we got there — and you can, too.
We went live with the one band at the end of December 2023.
Reflection.
Words matter. But they also need to be backed up by action. Paying lip-service to value is a thin veneer that will crack if you don’t also do the work to create change.
It speaks volumes that every content designer in Rob’s team took the time to message or speak to me to say that actually having a career progression framework, and salaries to match their product design partners, meant the world to them.
So… does the career map work? Testing was good, signs point to yes…but we’re about to find out as we head into our 2024 performance cycle.
Stay tuned. And did I mention we’re hiring? ;)
Appendix — Definitions.
1
Craft is a blend of creativity, psychology, technology, and user-centric thinking. It’s about creating experiences that go beyond functionality. Experiences that engage users on an emotional level and leave a positive and lasting impact.
Be a Designer is asking you to bring your training, your experience, your skills, your craft, your wild-eyed creativity and your unflinching attention to detail. Bring these things every day and execute at the highest levels of your discipline. That’s how to be a Designer.
2
Strategy helps us improve the product and experience over time. It requires a vision, goals, measures and a plan to get us where we need to go. To be successful, our strategy needs to prioritise work that supports real user needs as well as business growth.
Now, Next, Future is about understanding constraints — whether it’s deadlines, timelines, people or process. As designers, we have to think about the big picture while we’re executing on the first steps. Initial designs should provide scaffolding, include the foundations for future growth, and fit into the overall ecosystem.
3
Impact is the effect your work has on our customers, the business, and the people you work with. There are a million things we can do — impact is deciding what we will do based on the outcome it will have.
Do the right thing, not something. We shouldn’t mistake activity for delivery — or as a road to quality. Remember that motion isn’t necessarily progress. Question and challenge yourself and others to think bigger, to work smarter, to prioritise better. Design is a limited resource, to succeed we need to focus on the right things at the right time.
4
Influence is about understanding people — their goals, motivations and intent. It requires empathy, open collaboration and the ability to tell stories that lead your audience where they need to go. It’s about creating the change you want to see, and taking others on the journey with you.
Storytelling isn’t optional. A lot of our job in Design is framing an idea or persuading an audience. Data, facts and figures are not the most effective way to do this. Stories are. Stories are 22 times more memorable than facts. Tell more stories.
5
Leadership isn’t about rank or status. It’s about motivating and inspiring people to make something happen that won’t happen without them. True leadership is about helping others realise their potential and inspiring them to achieve a shared goal.
Have guts. Design exposes us. It makes us vulnerable. But vulnerability isn’t a weakness, it’s the source of courage. Use it to speak up, to take risks, to learn, to lead … to make things better.
