03Global
Making career progression clearer for product designers.
A shared framework for individual-contributor and management growth made expectations and coaching conversations more transparent.
- My role
- Design leader and framework creator
- Industry
- Media & entertainment
- Focus
- Team leadership, Career systems
- Scope
- Individual-contributor and management pathways
The short version
The case in three moves.
- Challenge
- Designers and managers needed a clearer shared language for expectations, progression and development priorities.
- Leadership
- I created two progression pathways, embedded the framework in regular development conversations and evolved it with team feedback.
- Outcome
- Designers reported greater clarity about expectations and managers gained a more consistent foundation for coaching conversations.
01 / Problem
Ambiguity makes development harder than it needs to be.
Without explicit expectations, designers can struggle to understand how they are performing or what progression requires. The result can be frustration, stalled development and inconsistent standards across the work.
Managers face the same problem from the other side. Development conversations rely too heavily on individual interpretation when there is no shared definition of what good looks like at each level.
02 / Framework
Create direction without creating a scorecard.
The framework evolved through three leadership roles and repeated use with design teams. It grew into two pathways, individual contributor and management, supported by development areas, competencies and clear levels of expectation.
Visual progress indicators helped designers and managers identify strengths and choose priorities together. The purpose was direction and transparency, not a scorecard detached from the work someone was actually doing.
03 / Adoption
Put the framework where development happens.
I embedded the framework in regular personal-development sessions. Designers prepared against it, tracked progress and used live work to demonstrate how their practice was developing. Their feedback shaped each iteration.
The system moved through different formats as the need for accessibility and wider use grew. Team updates and self-led development projects helped create shared ownership rather than leaving it as a leadership-only tool.
04 / Value
Shared expectations support better conversations.
Designers reported a clearer understanding of their progression and managers gained a more consistent basis for feedback. The framework made it easier to separate immediate performance conversations from longer-term development planning.
The model was shared more widely across the business and published as a Notion template for designers and managers. This created a useful external reference as well as a practical internal system.