One of the challenges that I undertook in 2019 was to come up with a more detailed career guide for our team.
While I did a lot of work on this, it was iterating on what I had with the rest of the experience leadership team that truly brought the work to a level where it could be shared. 

We just shared it with the team, so no feedback on it yet, but I’m hopeful that the team will find it useful.

The biggest thing I learned – don’t start from scratch! There’s a lot out there that’s worth leveraging.

Some key sources for me:

• A framework from Peter Merholz
  • https://orgdesignfordesignorgs.com/2017/05/12/design-team-levels-framework
  • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m-Cso3848CgEz0eng5spL0lDppnwOgt726jJ01pVwO8/edit#gid=288553197
  • This formed the backbone of our ‘soft/general skills’ section. We liked the idea of a ‘split’ at the higher levels between management and senior principal roles.
• Vend’s Product Design Competencies
  • This, ultimately, was what we used as a basis for some of our ‘hard skills’ section.
  • https://medium.com/we-build-vend/a-growth-plan-for-designers-21c8f287e63a
  • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MbDZqnQypHXhCJePd7VdIL4XHpJll6088rLag1EU2EY/edit#gid=0
• Product design roles at Buzzfeed
  • https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V8HHMXe2LIj4V6SfnxXm-3FCDkZP0U7lLt9dvtjNrHk/edit
  • While I didn’t find this robust enough to use directly, it inspired a few additional categories and descriptions
• “Driving and driving UX careers” by Ian Swinson
  • https://www.slideshare.net/RosenfeldMedia/designing-and-driving-ux-careers-a-framework-for-empowering-ux-teams-ian-swinson-at-enterprise-ux-2016
  • While I didn’t exactly use the framework or process laid out here, it did inspire a lot of ideas about how we could leverage our career framework for career evaluation and goal-setting
• Gov.uk careers
  • https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/digital-data-and-technology-profession-capability-framework
    • Check out the roles labeled “user-centred design”
  • I tried to base our framework on this initially, but we found it didn’t work for us. The overlap between the different disciplines became confusing, and it felt like there was a level of detail missing. For example, a graphic designer’s description didn’t mention color, layout, or typography.
  • However, we did use their role descriptions as a starting point for ours.

Edited to add: After sharing this post on an online forum, Jonny Burch pointed me to www.progression.fyi – a very comprehensive collection of professional frameworks! So if you want more examples, check that out.