Team members who are high on delivery and motivation are usually very serious about career progression and are always looking at opportunities to contribute more to the company and have a greater impact on the products. However, it’s never easy for an individual to figure out once he joins a team or a company as to how he will grow and how does his job become complex. It’s also important that a company promotes a culture where expectation setting and career progression are not just at the will of manager’s but there is a clear articulation of what the company values and it promotes a culture which thrives on those values. If the goal is to define career progression for a function in a lean way, so that a single sheet could give a bird’s eye view of what are some of the key tactical, strategic and behavioral expectations, you could follow a similar process to come up with a version which aligns to your companies requirements.
While career progression sometimes may end up being a conversation around working on broader technologies or an opportunity to work on a new project but in the long term it’s not a fundamental progression. As you gain skills and maturity, its important that the team members reflect the same through their roles, responsibilities and behaviors consistently so that the company as a whole benefits in achieving it’s goals. Below is a sample template for a developer track which could be used to define career progression at any organization, with what you value at which level in your organization.
Some of the key highlights
- Contribute – If you noticed, the document is heavily loaded with “Contribute” because we feel no matter what you are and what you do, you are always contributing and producing work on your own. If you are a company with a lot of people whose job is to generate and assign work to people, you probably have a very undesirable DNA.
- As you move from left to right, you gain and demonstrate the evolution of different competencies consistently.
- Irrespective of which level or job you belong to, you do not want to restrict disruption. Disruption is not limited to rolling at a new feature, there are many ways and means of disrupting the status quo and you should always be emphasizing to your teams to be disruptive to change the status quo.
- Innovation should not be one man/function/team job. Everybody should be empowered to innovate. Some companies have separate teams whom they call innovation teams, which itself conveys a message to other’s – “It’s fine if you are not innovating.”. Do you really want to do that ?
- There is a clear stress on courage, as you don’t want to have people in your team who only do what is told to them but never challenge or bring up issues.
- As you move from left to right on your career axes you are becoming strategic and also handling much more complexity to come up with solutions. A healthy mix of levels in a company will automatically help achieve it’s goals in a more cohesive way.
- There is no stress on process or adherence to a process, because process is suppose to empower you to do what is desired.
- You want to make sure that people just don’t move up the ladder because they have been in the company for a couple of years. For instance if they are not demonstrating the desired principal contributor competencies, then it’s pretty public to everyone and you would not need to deal with the politics.
- Fast movers would love such a setup as irrespective of their experience or when they joined the company, they clearly know as to what the company values and this is not a conversation that he/she needs to have with his/her manager every now and then.
- It doesn’t matter what is your current experience, or how long you have been in a level, if you are consistently demonstrating the next level, you make progress and it doesn’t put off anyone because it’s all public.
However, before you get to define such a framework it’s important to step back and answer a few key questions.