Design Career Frameworks: The Messy Plumbing of Scaled Design Programs

In the past decade companies across all industries have exponentially grown their internal design capacity, many of them adding hundreds — even thousands — of designers, in a range of specialized practices. While this overall trend is good news for design as a profession, it poses a series of challenges to ensure that design programs are built in a sustainable way, and that designers are able to grow their skills and advance their careers with clarity and purpose. Recently I joined Marc Fonteijn on an episode of his excellent Service Design Show podcast to discuss the ins-and-outs of design career frameworks in complex companies, and to reflect on my own experiences leading this work over the last decade during my time as an executive design leader at IBM and Expedia.

This companion article dives more deeply into the basic themes and concepts of that podcast episode.

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What is a career framework?

I like to think of a career framework as a roadmap that shows employees where they currently sit in an organization and what their opportunities are for future advancement. It also allows a business to strategically organize their teams according to the skills and capabilities required to successfully run their business. Career frameworks — usually owned and operated by a company’s Human Resources (HR) team — are composed of job families, which are groups of positions or roles that involve work in the same functional area and have related core skills. Examples of job families could be engineering, accounting, or design.

In larger companies with more complex HR systems, specific roles or positions sit within different job families. In a design job family, for instance, you might find roles like Service Designer, Visual Designer, or UX Designer. Job roles are mapped along a series of career levels that correspond with an employee’s depth of experience, eminence and accomplishment, and job titles will be attached to these roles along that path. For instance, a Content Designer might join a company at the Associate level, then progress to the Senior, Lead, and Principal levels as they advance at the company. All of this will be charted in an effective career framework.

Ultimately, I believe the purpose of a design career framework is to help designers and their managers to have clear, healthy, purposeful conversations about the designer’s career journey and their contribution to the success of the company.

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Why is this important for designers?

Since design is often a new type of job in established companies, designer job families and specific roles can easily be inaccurately or unclearly defined in the company’s career framework—or perhaps not even defined at all. Without clear and current articulation, organizations will struggle to adequately staff their teams and recruit new employees—they simply won’t know how many designers they have and in what roles—and an individual designer could find their career stalled or off course. Additionally, as design practices evolve at a rapid pace, new practice areas are continuing to emerge. For instance, in my time at both IBM and Expedia, the practice of Service Design was very new to each company which meant that we had to draft new job roles for Service Design and add them to the career framework. Looking ahead as the design profession continues to expand, we will see new design practices like AI Design, VR Design, or even Quantum Design emerging which will need similar attention.

Another factor that can complicate the way design shows up in a career framework is when companies go through a merger or acquisition (an increasingly common thing), or a major internal re-organization where teams are deconstructed and rebuilt. These events can reveal significant inconsistencies and gaps between different frameworks that need to be aligned and reconciled. For instance, two companies that have just merged might have different titles for essentially the same job; a common example of this is the confusion between a “Senior” Designer and a “Lead” Designer.

In a 2018 report on employee turnover, LinkedIn cited a “lack of opportunities for advancement” as the top reason people leave their job. This suggests there is an opportunity for us to get better at helping designers to envision their future at a company, and to help companies get the most out of their investment in design. A clear, transparent, well-designed career framework can be a way for designers and their managers to do this in a healthy and positive way.

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How should we be approaching this work?

The work of building and maintaining career frameworks is kind of like repairing and maintaining the plumbing in an old house: it’s remarkably unglamorous and often messy, requiring patience, persistence and attention to detail (and if you don’t take care of it, you could end up with a big problem on your hands). Here are some things to keep in mind as you approach this work:

• This will take time. In my experience, it could easily take 6–9 months to do the required research, writing, design, and launching.
• Likewise, be attentive to the time of year you are planning to release a new or updated framework (hint: don’t launch right before annual performance reviews)
• This is not a “one & done” endeavor. Beyond the heavy lifting of a new framework or major upgrade, you should be planning to do regular maintenance on an annual basis.
• Become good friends with your HR partners. These are important subject matter experts who have a wealth of experience and wisdom to share. Additionally, they will be able to help you map out the necessary approval processes for any new roles or major changes.
• Get to know your company’s existing frameworks. Often there are important patterns and vocabulary you can align with that will streamline your work. Additionally, many companies have awards and recognition for career accomplishments that designers can be included in. For instance, in my time at IBM we were able to chart the design career framework to include the very senior “Distinguished” and “Fellow” levels.
• Approach this as a DESIGN problem! At its core, this is about creating a better experience for people. You’re a designer, this is your superpower!

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Who should be included in this process?

The work of creating or updating a design career framework should be extremely inclusive. In addition to close collaboration with your HR team, here are some of the stakeholders you should include:

• Designers: Of course, they are your primary users and stakeholders.
• Design Managers: Likewise, this resource needs to make the work of a manager easier, not more complicated or confusing.
• Recruiters: Your talent team is a valuable conduit to the “outside” world; they are having conversations with candidates and job seekers, which could include some important clues for your work.
• Writers & Readers: Clear, concise, and consistent writing is an absolute must for this work so be sure you have a strong writer on your team, and a tight circle of readers/editors to support them.
• Executive Sponsors: You’re probably going to need the active support of a senior leader to clear blockers for you, so get them involved early.

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What should be included in a design career framework?

For me, the primary purpose of a design career framework is to help designers and their managers to have clear, healthy, purposeful conversations about the designer’s career journey, so there are a handful of basic components that should be included:

• High-level visualization of the framework. I think it’s important for designers to see and understand not only their specific role and path forward, but the entire framework. Visualizing this in a way that makes sense for your team could be a great way to inclusively design it.
• Clear, concise descriptions of each component of the framework. Obviously designers and managers should be able to quickly orient themselves in the framework, and get the necessary information on specific roles, positions, levels, and titles.
• Human-centered writing. Less obvious is how this information is written and presented. Typical HR language can be pretty cold and formal, and this presents an opportunity to craft the language of the framework in a way that easy to read and understand (and maybe even enjoyable).
• Guidance for career advancement. The first question any designer will ask is “how do I get to the next level?” Your framework should anticipate this, and begin to answer it with solid information and guidance.
• Self-assessment resources. One of the things my team at IBM included in their Design Career Playbook was a way for designers to track and assess their own performance and progress. This gives the designer agency in the process, and empowers them to take action outside the performance review or career conversation setting.
• Links to internal and external learning resources. Most companies have resources for professional development and continuous learning, such as technical acumen, leadership training, public speaking, etc. These can be a great addition to your framework resource.

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How should we measure the success of this work?

As you begin the work of creating or updating a career framework, you have a unique opportunity to define what success will look like. Understanding the current condition for your designers is an important way to set line baseline for future metrics. Here are some ways to think about measuring outcomes:

• Adoption: You can’t measure success unless your people are actually using the framework, so tracking the adoption and consumption of career resources should be a primary metric.
• Employee engagement and satisfaction: Most companies have existing systems for tracking employee sentiment on a regular basis. It’s possible that you could get aspects of your design career framework included in this polling. Another reason to have strong relationships with your HR team.
• Retention: This is a longer-term metric, but over time you might see an impact on designer retention that can be tracked to this work.
• Qualitative research: As always, simply asking your users and stakeholders for their feedback is a great way to gauge the impact you’ve had.
• Better yet… Consider ways to build a feedback loop into your actual framework that allows the community to give input and interact with the resource in real time.

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Once we’ve built our framework, are we good to go?

Not quite! Just as important as the research, writing, and building of the framework is making sure your community of designers and design managers knows it exists, where to find it, and how to use it. Be sure to include a change management plan in your overall career framework initiative to address these important aspects of socialization and training. If you think of it as an internal engagement campaign, this could be a really fun part of the project.

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As design programs in scaled organizations continue to grow, we have a rare opportunity to do the essential foundational work that will help ensure the long term sustainability, viability, and value of of design as a core competency of a successful organization. A strong, accessible, and usable design career framework can be a key piece of that work that will have value long into the future.

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There are a ton of great resources on design career frameworks out there. Here are a few that I would add to the list:

• Org Design For Design Orgs, by Kristin Skinner & Peter Merholz
  This is the bible for design operations with loads of relevant content.
• Fortifying the design career path at IBM, by Eunice Chung
  An excellent overview of the Design Career Playbook created by my team at IBM.
• Building our product design career development framework, by Jehad Affoneh
  I really enjoyed this story about how the team at VMWare built their framework, especially Jehad’s visualization of the overall ecosystem.

Special thanks to my former IBM teammate Elissa Dixit for helping to shape this article.