Design ladder: creating a career path for cross-functional teams.
Maybe the biggest challenge for contemporary design leaders: how to create a ladder design that encompasses the full range of roles and skills of today's industry?
Company
Team
Echos Innovation Lab
Juliana Proserpio
Segment
Type
Career
#culture #skills #career
As a design-driven innovation company, Echos has cross-functional teams under both education and innovation projects branches. To keep up with the needs and expectations of these diverse individuals, especially with the high turnover of creative industry professionals, the company had to design a career ladder that was able to clearly present to the team the possible paths to be taken as leaders and/or specialists.
As mentioned above, Echos has the specificity of having to rely on people with different experiences and backgrounds in the field of design, in addition to different levels of expertise within these specific disciplines.
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In order to facilitate the mapping of the possible roles and progressions in the two business units, we based our definition on the company's ten years of operation to delimit these areas of activity by asking ourselves: in more than a hundred projects, what were the main competencies demanded? and what are the skills of the future needed to continue developing design-driven innovation projects?
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We came up with the following structure: Design Thinkers, UX/UI Designers, UX Researchers, with levels ranging from junior to senior. In addition, seeking to build spaces of mastery, we defined lead roles for each domain of Echos performance according to their vision of the future: Phygital Services, Leadership, and Design Futures.
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​We put this structure in a table format, with an objective description of the role in the company's day-to-day activities, what kind of attitude is expected of the person at that level and position, their degree of decision-making in internal processes and in people management as well as the corresponding salary.
After making fine adjustments to the structure of the base design team, we set out to define the roles and competencies of the company's design leaders.
At the time we made these definitions, the company had a Chief Design Officer, a Design Director and a Head of Design Education. Being a lean team, it was essential to delimit the performance of each one so that the entire team was clear about the responsibilities of each leader when transforming the customer experience and the organization's vision, separating the moments when the leader is responsible or accountable for each stage in the process.
Being a 100% company offers a series of challenges regarding people management: culture maintenance, performance evaluation, hiring and recognition. A clear ladder design contributes to many of these aspects, as it transparently translates the company's vision of people to people, eliminating traditional doubts and questions about evaluation and promotion.
We introduced the model to the team in mid-2021, when we linked the ladder to the 1:1 performance review framework.