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Career framework inspiration from the world's best companies.
Progression.fyi is a collection of public and open source career frameworks and templates brought to you by Progression.
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Straightforward two track design framework from Amazon.
Eight level engineering career ladder from tech giants Apple.
Single track product management ladder from BCG Ventures
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The team at social scheduling app Buffer have put together one of the few purely generic frameworks, complete with write-up to cover how they’ve iterated through flat to more traditional company structure to get to their currently 80 staff. They also go into more detail about how they actually measure this, including levels and steps.
Buzzfeed implemented this framework in 2015, and updated it in 2016 to the current version. It documents both IC (Individual Contributor) and Manager responsibilites for designers at Buzzfeed.
A six-level engineering-focused framework from the globally distributed continuous integration and delivery experts. The framework was developed and introduced in 2018.
There are 6 levels as a Product Designer at Figma. As we’re still a small company, there are no official titles yet. We’re all just “Designers”, just as Engineers here are all “Engineers”. There are however expectations at different levels of seniority in your career that we recognize with appropriate pay scales and responsibilities. We do not yet have a separate manager track, or a communication design track yet; hierarchy is simple and flat.
Large team for engineering individual contributors and managers from Google.
Frameworks for product management and design from Dublin-based product legends intercom.
Product Management: Described as helping PMs to “Identify the most valuable problems to solve, enable your team to ship and iterate high-quality solutions quickly, and validate market impact”. Breaks skills into five areas – 1) Insight Driven, 2) Strategy, 3) Execution, 4) Driving Outcomes and 5) Leadership Behaviors.
The product and content design framework is one of several open source resources on the beautiful intercom.design site, the format matches the PM ladder in part, though picking ‘Products and Teams’, ‘Execution’, ‘Behaviours’ and ‘Results’ as topics.
Kickstarter’s framework was revealed shortly after Rent the Runway and again takes heavy inspiration from that work. It presents as one simple document, with roles and expectations for both engineers and data scientists written as prose.
Single track UX design ladder from LinkedIn
An incredibly in-depth set of tools, blog posts and frameworks to assess engineering levels at publishing platform Medium. Noteworthy because it encourages a varied number of paths to seniority, as illustrated by Snowflake, an exploratory UI on top of the framework
Single track design career ladder from Meta
Engineering career progression framework from Oracle
One of the first engineering ladders to be shared, and establishes the four pillars of “Technical Skill”, “Get Stuff Done”, “Impact”, “Communication & Leadership” that (often with wording tweaks) can be seen in many others now.
Individual contributor career ladder from Salesforce
Two track engineering career ladder from Tesla
IC and management track engineering framework from Uber
Single track product management ladder from WeWork
Wise (formerly Transferwise) have built and published an interactive career map for their product team, including detailed salary bands across different geographies.
One of the reasons they cite for the career map being valuable was as part of a general re-addressing of their diversity, moving their gender balance in PM from 20% to 40% female. Read all about it in their blog post, below.
Single track engineering career ladder from Adobe
Simple six level career ladder from Airbnb
Individual contributor and management engineering career ladders from Amazon.
Single track engineering career ladder from Box
Carta has eight full-time engineering levels, plus a separate level for interns. These levels are similar to the ones that exist at other comparable tech companies, but they’re not identical.
Seven level engineering career ladder from DocuSign
Six level engineering career ladder from DoorDash
Dropbox shares their progression framework covering many different disciplines including software engineers, quality assurance engineers, machine learning engineers, engineering managers and more.
A simple career ladder and competency matrix for engineers at Etsy
From the team: A set of shared expectations that we use to explain Farewill engineering at different levels of seniority. We’ve intentionally focused on a core set of examples that we think can fairly apply to any engineer at Farewill, but they’re not intended as a finite list of everything a great developer could do or be. There are many ‘shapes’ of engineers, and we’ll aim to celebrate people’s different strengths whilst also aiming for fairness and clarity through our core expectations.
Single track engineering ladder from Github
Single track engineering ladder from Goldman Sachs
Single individual contributor ladder for designers from Google
Single track product management ladder from IBM
Single track engineering ladder from Instacart
Single track product management ladder from Intuit
Single track engineering ladder from JP Morgan
Individual contributor engineering career ladder from Linkedin.
British bank Monzo first introduced this tool (now archived) in 2017 to help engineers and managers make development and career plans easier across Backend, Data, Mobile and Web development teams, later added a bunch more roles, including Design and Research.
Last year they deprecated their original framework, and created a v2 for Engineering in a PDF with an accompanying blog post. You can still see their original v1 framework on Progression, below.
Single track engineering ladder from Robinhood
Long single track engineering career ladder from Roblox
Large framework for individual contributors and managers from Salesforce
Single track engineering career ladder from Shopify
Slack’s single track engineering ladder
Songkick’s engineering framework is a really nicely designed PDF with seven different areas of competency: Leadership, Mentorship, Technical skills, Communication, Emotional intelligence, Delivery and Business knowledge. Some good reading presented in a clear and legible way. Because each level is on a single page, each employee could have it stuck to his or her space as a reminder.
Another framework for engineers and managers from Square. Again the rubric itself is fairly light on detail, but the accompanying blog post outlines nicely what the company expects and how it administers the framework.
Single track engineering ladder from Stripe
Single track engineering ladder from Twitter
Individual contributor career ladder from Uber
Single track product management ladder from Walmart
Single track product management ladder from Wayfair
From the team: We love it when teams challenge the expected way of building progression frameworks. The 8th Light team and Claudia have devised a new way of looking at the problem, placing technical ability and organisational impact on different axes, reflecting the diversity of interest between ‘born ICs’ and people more interested in moving into leadership or management roles, amongst other things. The write-up introduction is a useful overview of the methodology.
Apptension focuses its guide heavily on technical skillsets with granular check-boxes for individual skills in a developer toolkit. There’s some nice rationale around how to move between roles and what to do in your first couple of weeks, but it’s missing the softer skills and may be a bit ‘in the weeds’ for some.
The framework is a compass –not a GPS It does not intend to be an exhaustive list of everything you do but, instead, outlines what is expected of you at your level and serves as a guide for your development. Each team is different and sometimes expectations might not apply to your role. Therefore, it’s important that you meet with your Lead to define goals and align on the expectations for your role specifically. Levels are cumulative We expect you to demonstrate the contents of previous levels in addition to your own level. For example, a C3 is expected to fulfill 100% requirements of the C1 and C2 levels.
Brighton digital agency Clearleft have long been known for not only their work but their industry events, including UX London and Leading Design. The team have been vocal about career progression for years so it’s nice to see how they imagine skills working within their team. The framework doesn’t come with ‘roles’ so much as a bunch of defined skills which people can use to create their own.
Still in Alpha (at the time of writing), but with its own mirosite and API(!?), British newspaper The Financial Times nods to previous work from GDS and various others with their in-depth framework for the 240+ staff in the CTO’s organisation. This is a true product, and should grow and evolve over time.
FirstPort’s ladder was created to have shared expectations across the company around what we expect of engineers at different levels. It’s designed to help people in planning their career growth, to act as a communication aid between engineers and their managers, and to help folks to give appropriate feedback during reviews. It’s also used more widely, for things like assessing candidates’ seniority as part of our hiring process, and making salary offers at fair levels.
One of the biggest frameworks in this collection, stretching across engineering, design and many more roles, Gitlab’s dedication to documenting their people practices is admirable. Famously a remote team, the level of detail they’ve gone to is probably indicative of what’s needed to both hire and run a global team asynchronously at scale.
Inspired again by Rent the Runway’s work, Intent Media created their ladder to answer the questions of (a) what expectations everyone had of each other’s work; (b) what opportunities people had to grow within the company; and (c) what areas of their work they could focus on in order to best move into those new opportunities. There’s a great description at the start of the PDF giving more context as to the company size which necessitated this.
A fairly lightweight framework showing IC and leadership tracks, Jorge focuses on five pillars for engineers: Technology: knowledge of the tech stack and tools System: level of ownership of the system(s) People: relationship with the team(s) Process: level of engagement with the development process Influence: scope of influence of the position.
This Skills Matrix is a transparent career development framework that all UX team members use to chart and measure their growth with their managers at Loblaw Digital, where our teams build products for Canada’s biggest retailer. The matrix includes shared and unique soft and hard skills across Product Design and Mixed Methods UX Research.
Meetup just released their engineering ladders, alongside a great writeup of how they came to be. What’s interesting here is the definition of a ‘product engineering lead’ - a role not associated with seniority (it isn’t a title). Once again we see two paths, ‘maker’ and ‘manager’. Levels go from 2 to 8 (with management roles from 5+). These align with wider company seniority levels - the holy grail of growth frameworks.
From the author: At Ockam we value our High Performance Team. It is the responsibility of The Team to provide an environment where every individual is empowered to be world-class in their role and to enable individuals to achieve more than they could dream possible for themselves. This level guide helps us to align expectations and to create a framework where we have a common language to describe growth paths.
Redgate takes personal development seriously. We invest heavily in development opportunities and support individuals with Personal Development Plans, growing both individuals and teams.
Our Progression Framework helps our people grow more effectively. Giving a common sense of direction, along with visibility of different roles, it helps people to understand how to develop themselves while helping us grow as a company.
Sarah has open-sourced career ladders that she developed in her role as an engineering manager and VP. These ladders include engineering, developer experience and also technical writing (for documentation) - something we haven’t seen elsewhere to date. She describes the levels as such: Roles up to and including Senior, ladders are constructed around becoming the best at what one does that one might personally be. At Staff level, the career expands to help others be successful with what you do and know, and scale yourself. At Principal and beyond, you are trying to help others be the best that they can be, removing yourself and meeting others where they are.
dxw have written a great accompanying blog post for their design ladder, explaining (amongst other things) the importance of parallel tracks and even how team members use the spreadsheets as part of meetings.
Also interesting to note that this framework is one of the few that separate skill levels and seniority levels (though for the most part senior designers have to top out most skills aside from leadership).
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Further reading
Tired of looking at spreadsheets?
With Progression, create career clarity in minutes not months with our free templates and smart content builder.
Level up your team (or yourself!)
Join the completely non-spammy progression.fyi mailing list