When I joined Figma as a design manager in 2021, I wanted to get a better sense for what made a designer successful at the company. I would be hiring soon, and wanted to set the future team up for success. Everyone seemed to agree: It was all about craft. The problem was, we didn’t all agree on what “craft” meant. Was it about great visual design skills? Amazing prototyping capability? Designers with specialized skills like motion design? Without a clear definition, it was hard to coach and evaluate the team. The only resource we had was an early version of ladders and levels that was put together a few years back. That artifact had served us well as a smaller team, but hadn’t grown with us as the organization expanded to support multiple products and teams. So, we wanted to dig deeper: How did we measure craft at Figma?It wouldn’t be a real project without some scope creep, so of course improving our definition of craft snowballed to revamping our entire career ladder. This document is the final result of that project. But as with any good project, we are constantly looking for new ways to improve it as our company grows and roles shift.

A new, better career ladder would scale with us for the next few years, allowing managers to make stronger hiring and performance management decisions, and help individual designers on the team understand where to invest in developing their skills.

It's important to land on a career ladder early in a performance cycle, so that your teams don’t feel like they are being surprised with new information right before reviews. We also wanted the tool to encourage a more dynamic conversation between managers and reports. Our head of design, Noah Levin, iterated on the visual format for the file and developed a FigJam widget that would allow for easy (and delightful) self-assessments and performance reviews.

To improve the existing career ladder, I conducted a lot of research, sending out a basic survey to get started and asking questions like:

How are you using the existing career ladder today?

What questions do you want an updated career ladder to answer?

Anything you like about the current ladder you’d like to keep?

What other strong examples of levels or ladders have you seen?

We also gathered some inspiration from other company ladders. The main responses we heard were:

Craft - a strong need for knowing what good craft looked like at each level.

I encourage folks using this artifact to also use this widget when having live discussions. It makes those discussions and reflections more interactive. 

https://www.figma.com/community/widget/1207836110040407856

Jenny Wen

Chris Baty

Marcin Wichary

Sara Culver

Noah Levin

This Product Design + UX Writing Career Level document helped us streamline core competencies and facilitate reflective, tangible conversations around performance and career growth at Figma.

Product Design + UX Writing Career Levels

Welcome to Figma’s updated career level descriptions! 

We wanted to simplify and streamline our core competencies a bit, while giving space to describe skills at each level more granularly.

There’s no one right way! Some people may look at it once and never again; others may use it for career planning conversations more regularly. We hope it will be useful during performance season and to facilitate conversations between you and your manager about performance and career growth.

Level descriptions aren’t a checklist—they’re intended to elaborate on the skills required for every role. Each level contains the previous levels. Meeting each requirement does not guarantee promotion, especially at more senior levels, where there must be a business reason and the org must have enough scope to support it.

Is each skill equally important? What about specialization?

For L1 – L3: Each competency is equally weighted, and we’ve written descriptions as the minimum required skills at each level.

For L4 – L5: We recognize that designers and writers begin to show more “spikiness.” We will still want to see a good match of skills to team needs, and craft in particular will continue to be exceptionally important, but we’ll look at overall performance on average to evaluate and make hiring and promotion decisions.

We’re not pursuing separate specialized tracks for senior ICs; we don’t see an organizational need for specialists at this time and want to stay nimble.

How are these related to our company values?

The company values are the highest level guidance for being successful at Figma, and these level descriptions are tailored more to the day-to-day work of product designers.

Like most things at a growing start-up, we’re always seeking to improve our processes and practices, especially something as important as how we define our roles as designers. Please raise any concerns or ideas you have to your manager so we can try our best to address them!

Design Career Ladders at Figma

Product Design + UX Writing Career Levels

FAQ

How should I use this information?

Is each skill equally important? What about specialization?

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