💡How might we…

…help Designers have more meaningful growth conversations so that they can take control of their careers.

⚡️Problem

With a growing Design team of up to 40+ Product Designers, Design Researchers, Visual Designers, and Service Designers, across a leadership team of 8, our team struggled with growth and promotion conversations and lacked clear guidelines on what we looked for and the skills we valued in our Design team. This made it difficult to consistently hire, manage performance, or promote team members, or set expectations on performance.

Approach

A career growth and management model that aligns position descriptions, a career matrix, and a role competencies framework to articulate technical (Design) skills, cross-functional skills, and soft-skills and set clear expectations at different levels of seniority (Associate through to Principal).

It was important that the resources enabled goal setting through OKRs, learning and doing, and was supported by a feedback loop.

Tasks and activities

As the initiative lead, I proposed and drove this project with the support of the Design leadership team.

My responsibilities and activities included:

• Facilitating workshops with the Design leadership team to understand what our designers were doing and how they were operating

• Defining the skills, abilities and traits that were valuable

• Driving collaboration to create a role competencies framework

• Supporting the implementation of personal goal setting through OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

• Ensured alignment with updated position descriptions

• Supported the adoption in regular 1:1 conversations between designers and their managers

Outcomes

We increased our employee engagement score in following the release and support of this framework, and are continuing to track it as we iterate through the competencies and receive feedback from our Designers.