Product Design Career Competencies

Sept 2023

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Career Competency? Yes.

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Observe’s current CC

New Design Competencies

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• 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?

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Start with WHY

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The WHY

• A desire for more detail. Phrases like “can handle complex product challenges” weren’t specific enough or were too subjective to be helpful in performance and growth conversations. The team had a clear hunger for more concrete examples. T-shaped designer. Someone called a T-shaped designer is a designer with an extensive set of skills, but an expert at one of these skills.
• A need for clarity around senior levels. Designers can tend to be spikier in their skillset, or more “T-shaped,” as they get more senior. The team wanted us to make an explicit call on how we saw promotion and hiring at those levels. Did we want to continue to require someone to be excellent across the board as their seniority grew, or did we want to reward the natural specialization that often occurs?
• Craft, craft, craft. As expected, we saw a strong theme around articulating what good craft looked like at each level in a more robust way, and teasing out which skills made up a strong craftsperson.

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• It wasn’t clear how ratings and promotions are determined; it feels like a checklist.
• There was a big gap between our senior and principal levels; our highest levels weren’t described clearly.
• We held people accountable for outcomes they don’t control.
• Some competencies overlapped with others or didn’t align with how we work.
• Many competencies we care about weren’t documented.
• It’s copied from other companies and not customized for Observe

How great design teams did it?

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Figma

How the Figma design team level set on career leveling | Figma Blog��Figma Career Level

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• They look into 12 skills in 4 categories. Then slice by 5 levels
• Strategy: Product, research, vision
• Craft: Visual, interaction, systems
• Collaboration: Communication, process, mindset
• Impact: Effectiveness, leadership, citizenship
• Stated with a survey of “what you expect the ladder solves?”
• Good ideas: skill groups, no more “ladder (single path)”, yes to “stages” or “levels”
• Manager draft → team review → Product team → Exec
• why we’d taken on this project and what we hoped this work would contribute to career growth conversations for all designers
• Use it in Perf review and calibration
• Love the skill widget

Julie Zhou/ Meta

How to Work with Designers. A Cheat Sheet for Engineers and PMs | by Julie Zhuo | The Year of the Looking Glass | Medium�

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• Visual design: typography, contrast, hierarchy, and the good ol’ does it look good? falls into this category. Do your eyes fall on the right things? Are the details crisp or are they sloppy? More importantly, does the visual design work together as a system?
• Interaction design: is it easy and clear to for a user to do X? Is the navigation system robust? Do transitions and animations feel satisfying and make the app feel more intuitive to use?
• Product design: does the design successfully solve a problem? Is the thing that is designed useful? Does it have a clear vision? Does it contribute value?

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• Designer Lvl 1: Design a form that lets people edit their profile. Pretty scoped—assumes there is a profile, and that the solution takes the shape of a form.
• Designer Lvl 2: Design the best interface for users to edit their profile. The solution could be a form, could be a WYSIWYG inline editor, could be a modal window.
• Designer Lvl 3 (broad): Design a system for editing across everything—profiles, posts, settings, etc. Now we’re not just profiles, but the editing system should be flexible enough to work across the entire app.
• Designer Lvl 3 (deep): Design a way to get users to want to update their profiles. Here, the questions the designer is asking is why should users update their profile? And when? And how to best convey the value proposition?
• Designer Lvl 4: Design a solution to increase the authenticity of users among your app. Maybe editing profiles isn’t even the right thing to focus on for our ultimate goal, maybe a peer-review system would be better.
• Designer Lvl 5: Identify the biggest product problem with your app/company/site and design a solution.At the highest level, the best designers drive the vision for a product.

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Intercom

Redesigning our job levels for product designers - The Intercom Blog

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• 71% of design orgs don’t have a career progression framework. Less than 1% have documented competencies with scorecards for rating performance.
• Encourage actions a designer controls versus outcomes they can’t.
• Focus on reality, not aspirations.
• The expected outcome
• Designers know what’s expected of them and control how they meet those expectations.
• The path to the next level is clearer and more reachable for all designers.
• Performance reviews are more effective and focused on what we care about.
• Design candidates can better prepare for their interviews.
• We all achieve better business outcomes faster.
• Removing lines that are based on subjective measurement

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“The only thing harder than designing a product is designing your career. And many organizations, unfortunately, don’t make it any easier.�

Do we have the guts to put it out there?

Progression.fyi

Exercises:

Start at the end & Sprint questions

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Start at the end

https://www.figma.com/file/bOmLJROBmt4nw40n5jIPNR/Career-levels%3A-Vision-Board?type=whiteboard&node-id=0%3A1&t=qfcEaT4gJdS6P7Lp-1

Sprint questions: Where we are now and what are the biggest problems

Homework:

Vote on the ones that inspires you

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https://www.figma.com/file/kAdJR79PXapIB07VMTP5NX/Observe-Product-Design-Career-Levels?type=whiteboard&node-id=0%3A1&t=I4CHr6JlFlDDWUXY-1

Next steps

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1. Improve it �we like look for what is missing, what is confusing or too vague, and what can be removed. The recommendation is do a experimental self evaluation to really read into it.�
2. Self assessment & manager calibrate �Post refinement. We will do a calibration session between your own evaluation and mine evaluation to me using this framework. And analyze the delta.�
3. Career next-play goal setting (Before end of Oct)�Based on the post calibration result, we will use it a do a more structured goal setting. Focusing on the next level of each skill.�
4. Sharing with team/functions who collaborate with designers to set role expectation (Nov)�
5. Planning the utilization of this new framework for the March Performance Review

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© 2022 Private and Confidential