Design Manager Sara Culver takes us through rebuilding the design ladder, rung by rung.

How Figma’s design team evolved their career levels

https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-design-team-career-levels/

https://twitter.com/nlevin/status/1639006496620158982?s=46&t=italiJw59BNptuIoeo0WdA

Very excited we’re sharing our refreshed design career framework publicly! Big team effort, with Sara Culver leading the process:
https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-design-team-career-levels/

(TT: https://twitter.com/nlevin/status/1639006496620158982?s=46&t=italiJw59BNptuIoeo0WdA)

The skills chart is really interesting! I’m curious how y’all are thinking about this visual across the sum of a persons projects vs their individual moments or needs of the project? Interesting to use that chart as both an expectation setting visual as well as for assessments.

I love getting aligned on “craft” - its a classic “everyone agrees on this thing but has a different idea of what it means” term. (See also: “show users value”)

Good question. The hope is it’s flexible enough where you can use it for both if you wanted. But so far we use it as a snapshot in time, that’s likely covering some period of time like last 6mo

But related: we use it for hiring too, where we make a chart for our ideal candidate

One interesting thing about this: we actually rolled it out nearly a year ago, but we didn’t want to write about it until we felt we lived with it for two performance review cycles to know if it held up

And it did for the most part! Though def working on some improvements too.

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