Design Career Ladders

Lex provides a public design skill grid with dozens of skills. With so many skills, she introduces the concept of skill groups to help organize them. She uses 6 skill groups: Facilitation, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Research, Business Strategy, and Development. Lex also provides insight into her process for how she tracks her own ongoing skill development.

Siva explains how very few companies are thoughtful about how to help designers forge senior-level career pathways, but some organizations have explored three options: 1) Senior ICs 2) Hybrid player-coach designer 3) Design (people) managers

Todd presents on what makes a good career ladder, how to assess competency, the value to ICs and managers, and the path to design management.

Helena walks through her process for building a career ladder at for the design team at DoorDash. She identified the audiences, performed a competitive landscape audit, established design principles, designed a solution, and then tested and iterated with the audiences. She wraps up with 4 key learnings.

Intercom redesigned their product designer job levels to provide clearer career paths and advancement for their designers. They started by identifying problems through Employee Surveys, then determined what good job levels should look like by reviewing industry examples and setting principles. They made key changes like introducing a new staff designer level, focusing expectations on actions designers control rather than outcomes, grouping competencies into meaningful categories, and documenting previously unstated expectations that are important. Intercom believes setting clear expectations is an act of kindness that helps designers perform their best, so they shared their updated job levels publicly to help other teams.

Intercom's design career ladder for ICs covers 5 levels, with 21 skills across 3 skill groups - Strategy, Execution, and Behaviors.

GitLab's design career ladder for ICs covers 4 levels. GitLab doesn't use skill groups, but does cover 10-15 skills per level.

Figma's product design career ladder covers 6 IC levels, with 6 skill groups: • Product Strategy (Before you work) — Designing the right thing • Craft + Quality (While you work) — Designing the thing, right • Communication + Collaboration (Working together) — Being clear + easy to work with • Action + Impact (Shipping) — Being efficient and productive • Leveling Up Others (Internal Influence) — Improving design team, and design at Figma • Independence (Self-sufficiency) — Working proactively without supervision

Cap & BuzzFeed learned some important lessons before making their 3rd version of a design career ladder: skills needed for promotion can be unclear, employees and managers can be misaligned on skill levels, some skills were missing in prior versions, and organizational language fell out of date. BuzzFeed's design career ladder covers 5 IC levels and 4 manager levels. Each level has about 12 skills, with examples of multiple sub-skills for each skill.

Hardik explains how the design org at Unacademy maps skills and expectations to their design career ladder.