PRESENTED AT PRODUCT ELEVATION 2022
How to Scale
Rethinking the Product Design Career Ladder
A step-by-step process for organizing and growing your product design team.
Why It's Important
The product design industry faces exceptionally high turnover—51% of designers seek new roles within a year due to ineffective leadership and limited growth opportunities.
To address this, I analyzed proven strategies from successful design organizations, influential design leadership perspectives, and my own experience. My objective was to outline a clear, actionable process to revitalize a stagnant design team, foster career growth, and significantly improve employee retention.
Look to Your Team
Solving organizational design challenges begins by applying fundamental user experience principles—listening deeply and empathetically to your primary users: the team itself. It’s critical to identify the underlying systemic issues that impact morale and productivity.
Initially driven by my own frustrations with stalled career growth and a lack of leadership support, I independently undertook comprehensive research, team interviews, surveys, and data analysis. This resulted in a detailed proposal outlining specific opportunities for organizational expansion, clearer roles, and improved career structures.
Despite facing limited resources and minimal managerial support, I moved forward confidently, understanding that true leadership involves demonstrating possibilities rather than waiting for perfect conditions.
A leader is someone who demonstrates what’s possible.
— Mark Yarnell
What is a Career Ladder?
A career ladder is a clearly defined, often hierarchical framework outlining a team or department’s organizational structure. Specifically, it:
Provides a transparent overview of team composition and interactions.
Defines explicit career progression paths.
Offers opportunities for lateral and vertical advancement through collaboration and continuous learning.
Amplifies the voice of design within the organization without ranking team members by perceived importance or facilitating micromanagement.
Enables clear tracking of team members’ goals, skills, and aspirations.
What is a team health monitor?
A team health monitor is an agile, self-assessment tool used to evaluate a team’s effectiveness and overall morale. Essentially serving as an in-depth retrospective, the insights gained help improve team relationships, processes, productivity, and professional growth.
Inspired by Atlassian’s "Team Playbook," which surveyed over 1,000 team members across various industries, this practice underscores the importance of empathetic transparency—encouraging open idea-sharing, decision-making involvement, and meaningful interpersonal connections for stronger team performance.
As a critical first step toward creating a career ladder, I adapted the Team Health Monitor survey, incorporating questions from Atlassian’s methodology, industry research, and original content, focusing on Collaboration, Communication, Growth, Performance, Support, Titles, and Transparency.
I analyzed and visualized the data to highlight areas needing attention in our proposed career ladder. My own responses were included separately to prevent data skewing and maintain integrity.
Sample Questions From Team Health Monitor
Rate how well teamwork and collaboration among associates is valued by your team members/manager.
How often do you collaborate with your team members/manager?
How good is the communication between you and your team/your manager?
How efficient are team meetings?
Do you feel supported?
Do you feel like there’s a shared common vision and work ethic?
How knowledgeable is your team about the company’s goals?
Who are the decision makers?
How quickly are decisions acted upon?
How well do your current job responsibilities match your strengths?
What strengths do you have that you feel are not being utilized?
Do you feel your job title matches your responsibilities?
Do you feel the job titles of other members of your team match their responsibilities?
How clear are you on your performance? What metrics are you given?
Do you receive valuable input about your performance from your team members/manager?
How are you rewarded for performance?
Do you feel there is a clear, defined path for your professional growth on the team?
Do you have any other comments, questions, or concerns?
Capture and Chart the Responses
The easiest way to conduct this survey and capture the responses is to use a simple online form that generates a spreadsheet. From there, chart the responses to create visual representations of your perceived team health and to summarize your results.
The Trouble With Titles
Many organizations mistakenly believe that simply defining titles and associated pay grades adequately structures their teams. Typically, financial considerations precede defining the necessary skill level, often resulting in discrepancies between the job title, candidate qualifications, and actual responsibilities.
Organizations commonly default to hiring senior-level talent, but often place them into roles that don’t align with their expertise due to budget constraints, creating frustration and diminishing effectiveness.
Additionally, the lack of industry-wide standardization around design titles leads to confusion. Roles labeled "Senior Designer," "Design Lead," "Principal," or "Director" vary significantly across companies. Therefore, each organization must clearly define these roles to ensure alignment, clarity, and consistency.
Defining Product Design Roles
Clearly defining organizational roles provides transparency regarding responsibilities and career paths, enabling better alignment between individual team members’ growth and the organization's broader objectives.
create role definitions
Set your team up for growth by taking the time upfront to craft organizational definitions for Product Design roles. This not only provides clarity on responsibilities, but helps when structuring career paths within the team and greater org.
These role definitions are not set in stone. They should change as the needs of your team change. These are meant to be used as a basis for what results from the next step in the process, generating a Skills Matrix.
Generating a Skills Matrix
“A skills matrix, if done correctly, aligns the team on essential skills required for collective success, highlighting current strengths, identifying gaps, and clarifying aspirational capabilities. It must reflect future organizational goals rather than merely the current state."
After defining roles, the next step is conducting a collaborative workshop to build a skills matrix.
A skills matrix outlines essential skills required for team success—encompassing design craft skills, collaboration, communication, and leadership competencies. While individual team members may not possess every skill, collectively, the team must ensure coverage across the full spectrum of required abilities.
Workshop Agenda
Clearly explain the exercise, objectives, and expected outcomes.
1
Have each participant propose core skills aligned with established categories.
2
Review and clarify the proposed skills collectively.
3
Allow each participant five votes per category to highlight the most essential skills.
4
Collaboratively establish a prioritized list of core skills, empowering each participant with veto power to ensure consensus.
Why this exercise matters
This process naturally surfaces shared beliefs, identifies new skill needs, discards outdated assumptions, and reveals leadership potential organically. The agreed-upon skills then inform roles essential to achieving strategic team success, laying a strong foundation for a meaningful career ladder.
If your current team structure looks like this …
you’re doing it wrong.
And here’s why…
Advancement Tracks Only Lead Straight Up
Traditional organizational structures that offer only linear paths into management present significant limitations:
Limited career mobility; no options for lateral growth.
Leadership roles may not align with individual preferences or strengths.
Distinct differences between craft leadership and people management are often unrecognized.
Responsibilities and skills tend to become siloed.
Advancement opportunities become scarce, creating frustration and stagnation.
Lack of clear delegation results in task overload and burnout.
Lateral Movements are Still Opportunities
Career growth isn’t solely upward; lateral moves present valuable opportunities to explore new areas, develop new skills, and test potential leadership capabilities. These moves significantly enhance employee satisfaction and retention by providing growth opportunities even when vertical promotions aren't possible.
“Lateral experiences can help you to fine-tune skills, build new relationships, learn a new or different approach, acquire deeper hands-on expertise, see the organizational operations from a different angle, and add to your knowledge base.”
“You can think of the exploratory experience as a chance to investigate possibilities. It may involve short-term work assignments or shadowing someone who’s in a position you may be considering. The exploratory experience could be as simple as having a conversation about the requirements of a role that seems attractive to you. It’s a chance to check things out to see what will work—and what might not work. Exploring is a very smart step to take before investing time and energy in pursuing other experiences.”
Leaders Don't Always Want to Manage People
Effective people management requires distinct skills and genuine passion. Yet, many organizations mistakenly assume management roles are universally desirable. Often, talented designers become managers without having the necessary skills or passion, negatively impacting teams.
Authentic leadership involves prioritizing the development and success of team members, assuming responsibility for outcomes, and guiding teams through challenges.
“Leadership is a privilege, not a position.”
“People leadership is hard and requires a very different set of skills, which must be learned over time, taking precedence over design skills.”
“Becoming a manager is not a promotion, it is a career change.”
Distribution of Skills Creates Success
Teams with diverse skillsets consistently outperform those where roles and responsibilities overlap excessively. Effective teams require complementary, diverse talent working in harmony toward common goals rather than identical skillsets or roles.
“Team members must complement each other, must develop the right chemistry, if the value of the team is to be fully realized. This doesn’t mean, however, that members are clones of each other. For example, the degree of focus on results and relationships needs to be the right mix within a team to produce optimal outcomes. In particular, a group that is heavily results oriented will benefit from having some members who are more relationship focused. Inversely, a group that is heavily relationship based will benefit from adding those who are more task focused.”
from Extreme Teams
Promotions Should Happen for the Right Reasons
Promotions should reward consistent performance, tangible results, and alignment with organizational values—not simply tenure or subjective preferences. Clear, results-based criteria ensure fairness, team morale, and sustained organizational integrity.
“Less extreme but more common are firms that promote people who behave in ways that are at odds with the values they embrace. For instance, a firm talks about the importance of results and then promotes someone who repeatedly fails to deliver on his or her performance targets. Or a firm says that it values teamwork and then promotes someone who has delivered results but in a manner that is anything other than collaborative (hoarding information from other groups, failing to share resources, or undermining colleagues who are viewed as competitors, for example)."
from Extreme Teams
Delegation Fosters New Opportunities
While exceptional designers may possess broad capabilities, effective leadership means delegating appropriately to minimize distractions and empower designers to focus on their core strengths.
Effective delegation fosters a focused, supportive environment where teams feel valued, supported, and driven to excel.
“If done well, team members will learn to appreciate the ability to remain focused on the work, instead of being sucked into the work-about-the-work that insidiously steals a surprising amount of time.”
“Much of what causes designers to stress in their work is the result of flawed operations.
Symptoms include:
Trouble coordinating internally, particularly around process, communications, and file management
Difficulty collaborating with other parts of the organization
Inappropriate staffing on projects and programs
Lack of visibility into related work-streams or duplicate efforts
Non-existent measurement”
Breaking Down Barriers
Empowering teams means creating environments where ideas are welcomed, team members feel heard, and their contributions significantly impact organizational decisions. Including designers in strategic conversations significantly enhances morale and innovation.
“In the past, the highest barrier to innovation was organizational structure, with hierarchy and silos acting as bottlenecks. But that’s changing. With cross-functional teams, flat organizations, and collaboration becoming the norm, the gap between our desire as individuals to innovate and the ability to execute our ideas is less pronounced.”
“Even flat or matrixed organizations can fall victim to this type of negative behavior if a company centralizes decision-making in the hands of a toxic leader, stifles transparency, or fails to genuinely empower people to do their job. When employees feel trapped in a system in which they can’t be their best selves, negativity becomes a core part of the culture.”
from In Great Company: How to Spark Peak Performance
By Creating an Emotionally Connected Workplace
Dividing the Path
The evolving nature of product design roles requires offering distinct career tracks tailored to individual preferences and strengths:
Craft Leadership
Deepening hands-on expertise without direct team management.
people Leadership
Guiding teams through operational excellence and mentorship.
A hybrid role
Balanced roles blending craft and people leadership responsibilities.
Team members should feel empowered to choose paths aligned with their strengths, interests, and growth aspirations—with flexibility to explore lateral opportunities.
Example of a Multi-Path Career Ladder
steps for Making It a Reality
1
Leverage Team Health Monitor results to identify improvement areas.
2
Clearly assess and define current team titles.
3
Collaboratively build and finalize the team skills matrix.
4
Define roles essential for achieving strategic goals.
5
Meet individually with team members, aligning their strengths and goals with career paths.
6
Restructure into multi-path career tracks emphasizing Craft, People Leadership, & Hybrid roles.
7
Clarify performance metrics and consistently recognize and reward team efforts.
the results of my case study
I presented my findings, insights, and structured approach in a detailed proposal. Although my professional journey led me to pursue new growth opportunities, the resulting framework remains validated and has significantly informed my leadership approach in subsequent roles.
This structured, research-driven method formed the basis of my presentation at Product Elevation 2022, titled “How to Scale: Rethinking the Product Design Career Ladder."
I welcome dialogue, additional insights, or experiences related to effectively scaling design teams—let’s continue the conversation!