Career Ladder and Composition of Product Development Teams

🎯 Goals

The benefits of establishing scaling career ladders are multiple:

An objective and transparent way of acknowledging a person's professional level
A fair foundation when determining compensation
Motivation for people to challenge their own status quo
A tool to attract top talent from the open market
A tool to retain talent in the company
Overall internal expertise will raise because people are motivated to grow within any discipline without having to transition to manager or other tracks

🫂 Everyone wins

Everyone wins when there’s a career ladder:

Management: a good manager should provide regular feedback about how well employees are meeting their current obligations, as well as developing and demonstrating the career skills they’ll need to grow. A career ladder provides an unbiased framework to structure these discussions.
Recruiting: a good career ladder should make it fairly easy to level-set prospective candidates. Teams can establish a standard set of questions and hiring bar for each level, and do an apples-to-apples comparison between people.
HR compensation ranges: before we start hiring engineers, we need to decide what to pay them. We want internal tiers and a way to match these to industry market rates.
Employees: Transparency, clarity and fairness of expectations and responsibilities per level. Inspires growth and development of a person's career.

Ladder level is not tied to a specific role or corporate level
- Being Tech Lead for a team does not require nor provide a specific ladder level
Each level provides a comprehensive set of guidelines
Promotions are given after consistent performance on the next level