I ran this exercise when I was first joining the company. My most immediate priority was to scale the team significantly, as well as to unify a few separate design teams across marketing, product, and research. It was really important to understand what was already going on in the org: how they viewed their roles, how other departments viewed them, and also potentially air some grievances about the ways of working they wanted to leave behind.

The exercise spanned across two days. I left a lot of time for discussion and debate on day one. From there I created the team career ladder, then we went back in and reviewed it together to make sure that it still aligned with everything that we believed.

This exercise was eye-opening for me as a new leader, and I’ve only had positive reviews from my team. To enable rapid scaling, the team needs to understand how their new leader will be measuring them — and it was empowering to be able to influence that measurement. It creates a sense of trust in new leadership as well. They understood that I wasn’t just instituting best practices from a different company, but rather that I was working hard to understand their context and values.

The levels themselves match up to the company's defined leveling structure, but the requirements are ours to own and to evolve as we see fit. I think in some organisations there would need to be some level of approval or gut check at this stage, but in my experience there has always been trust that I (and my team) know better what it takes to be a designer than anyone else. I will add that I ran this exercise with researchers and design leadership as well, so I don't think this is discipline-specific.

I also incorporated the results of this exercise into our process for hiring new designers. 

This section, you might notice, isn't really part of what makes it into the career ladder, primarily it focuses on what we need to hire, the real sore spots for the team and a great place to air grievances. This is excellent information to have. 

The quotes and stickies from this section almost always go directly into my discussions with product leadership or HR for hiring requests around the things designers seem to be doing a lot of that they are not happy about. And sometimes, we find that there is someone on the team who really loves the things that people are complaining about. In those cases, we can shift some responsibilities around to suit individuals better.

This is often a place where I share what I am actually measured on, as their leader, and what I expect to measure them on as well. It changes the way people see what you ask about, review or align around. 

In so many people's careers — especially designers who have often been seen as vaguely unmeasurable for some reason — they haven't had really clear criteria on what success means for their roles. I really want to make sure those are completely aligned and objective, especially when it comes to promotion conversations. Sharing all the ways I will measure them and all the possible success criteria shouldn't result in anyone saying, "This is unfair," but rather, "Oh really? Ok, then let's focus on that" "Can we measure this instead?" It ends up being enlightening on both sides.

Amber Rucker

I ran this exercise when I was onboarding to a new role, where I needed to build trust and scale our design function quickly.

For each category the designers should write as many sticky notes as they can think of. We use 2 minutes for input for each category and when they are all complete we move on to digging into them.

As a group we read each sticky note and group them together if possible (which is why you’ll see stickies with bullet points and groups below) as well as editing based on discussion. Not timed.

Each designer uses 2 stickers per category to mark the stickies they consider the most important. This is also timed

We go through and create categories of job responsibilities from the first two categories and how to measure them from the measurement category. We agree on the most important and those form the basis of our career ladders.

From the output of this exercise the manager/leader of the team would fill in what a reasonable level of execution would be for each level within the job responsibility categories. These should be firmly measurable in order to ensure there is no confusion on what level someone would be performing within. These expectations should be something the designer would perform regularly, not just once, in order to be 

Career Ladder Exercise for Design Teams at Veriff

Career Ladder/Expectations Exercise

How to build career ladders as a team

Step one: Input

Step two: Grouping & Discussion

Step three: Voting

Step four: Agreement & Expansion

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