Design Levels Matrix

I started by reviewing the levels matrixes from my own previous positions, as well as examples I could find on the internet published by other design leaders. Once I had gathered ~10 examples, I reviewed them to cross reference which skills (and breadth of those skills) were widely agreed upon for the different levels. At this point, I also made a pros and cons list with what I felt were the strong points and weak points of each matrix.

At the time I was reading Becoming The Evidence-Based Manager, which had a lot of helpful information about how to discuss and set goals with your direct reports. Another article that I found particularly helpful was A Guide to Becoming a Senior Product Designer by Aaron James.

Simplify the levels matrixes to remove “special” skills such as motion design, UX research, graphic design, etc. We’re not levelling up unicorns, our goal is to help product designers go from junior to senior, any special skills they have outside of the core skills required for their role shouldn’t affect their eligibility for promotion. Motion design skills can not take the place of “Understanding the business’ product portfolio” and therefore can not be used to argue for promotion.

After the initial matrix was created, it was shared with the team and feedback was received and edits were made to remove or revise sections we felt were repetitive or unclear.

Process (The Plan)

Additionally, we developed a process to use the matrix as a tool to take actionable steps towards the development and/or improvement of skills and ultimately work towards promotion. The process is as follows:

Assess

With each designer, review the matrix together and identify where they are in each section and agree upon which skills they will need to work on to level up.

Discuss the designer's goals and ideal timeline for achieving these goals. Help the design set a realistic timeline for themselves by recognizing that some skills take longer to cultivate than others and also an opportunity must be presented for the skills to be tested and visible to the organization.

Plan

1. Discuss the designer's timeline for promotion with your superior, so that everyone is on the same page about what their goals are and a discussion can be started with regards to how to prepare the business for the implications to the budget and to the hiring plan if their upskilling is successful.
2. Select 3 or less skills to work on during the next 4 months.
3. Schedule a review every 4 months to check-in on their development and set new goals for the next 4 months.
4. Where possible, assign designers to projects where they can build on the skills they are looking to work on before each review. These tasks or projects need to be:
   • Easily measurable: Avoid anything that is too novel.
   • Highly collaborative: Working with large cross-functional teams will provide many people to get firsthand feedback from on the designer's skills and performance. Collecting and sharing as much of this feedback as possible with superiors is useful provide evidence of growth.
   • Important to the business: It’s easier to argue for a merit based promotion when the project is something that has significant value to the business. Although it is tempting to assign an important project to a senior designer, we can dually benefit by assigning the project to a junior designer and assigning a senior designer to mentor and guide them to work on their own leadership and influence skill sets.

Review & Document

Every 4 months, review and document the progress of these skills and collect feedback from colleagues working closely with the designer to back up the progress you are seeing as their manager.

Share the documentation or reports with your superior/C-level manager and review the next set of skills the designer will be working towards.

I’ve only tested our matrix and plan on one designer. Her goal was to go from Product Designer to Senior Product Designer in one year. In our initial assessment we identified that she had many of the visual skills, but was weaker in some of the collaboration and business understanding areas.

In order to help her reach her goals, we started by assigning her to the Dashboard project where she would be working with a different development team than she was used to, as well as key stakeholders in finance, legal and product. During this project, I encouraged her to reach out to developers, members of our research team and other employees to answer questions she had instead of relying on someone from the design team to fill in gaps in her knowledge.

Each performance review, we would review the feedback from other team members and assess together whether or not we felt that she met the requirements for the Senior level description. Each review would document which senior level skills/traits had been achieved and have anecdotes and colleague feedback to support the growth, then we would choose new skills to work on for the next review and outline how we might work on those skills.

By providing my superiors with documentation outlining what the designer was working towards, whether or not they achieved it and how they worked on/achieved it, we were able to support the argument for promotion and show a clear dedication to improvement.

Following this method, we managed to level her up to a Senior Product Designer in just over a year, which met with her goals and was a good amount of time to test our method for levelling up.

Some Take-aways

There were some review periods where we didn’t completely achieve our goals because the skills or traits were more complex and took a little longer to develop.

Another thing we didn’t necessarily account for in our plan, was my maternity leave and how that would impact our plan with my superior conduction the final review.

Another consideration that I missed while planning was that the company’s promotion and budget schedules did not exactly line-up with our goals, hence the promotion actually came slightly later than we had aimed for.