Redesigning our job levels for product designers
The only thing harder than designing a product is designing your career. And many organizations, unfortunately, don’t make it any easier.
For instance, the Design Career Index shows that 71% of design orgs don’t have a career progression framework. Less than 1% have documented competencies with scorecards for rating performance. But if you don’t have a map for your career, then how do you know where you’re going?
We’ve recently updated our product designer job levels to give our designers a map for advancing their careers at Intercom. Our goal was to make them clearer, more useful, and more realistic. We’re also sharing them publicly to help those design teams without job levels to create their own.
If you’re a design leader struggling to come up with job levels, expectations, and career paths, this post will help you get started.
We believe everyone performs their best when they know what’s expected of them. No one should ever have to read your mind or guess what they need to do to advance. That’s why we’re upfront with candidates about what we look for in designers before they interview with us. That’s why we use the same criteria to hire people as we use to evaluate their performance after they join.
