Growth Framework, Career Guideline, Career Ladder, whatever you call it, is essentially general expectations of each of the grade, sometimes people call it as career ladder, but we at Mekari wanted to take it further down into its philosophy: Framework. In general, a framework is a real or conceptual structure intended to serve as a support or guide for the building of something that expands the structure into something useful.
Why we need a growth framework ?
Ultimately this explicit expectation is intended to make the implicit explicit, bring transparency to its best, and reducing subjectivity to achieve fairness across the team members, managers, and stakeholders.
aside from that, this framework can be used to provide the following benefits :
- Minimize Bias in Feedback and Promotion
Tools that provide objective measurements of success and eliminate ambiguity help decrease bias in promotions and encourage reviewers to address work rather than personality in performance reviews.
- Manage Upward and Encourage Company-wide Alignment
It’s much easier to have productive conversations about promotions upfront when we have a common understanding: framework, than it is to wait until you believe someone deserves a promotion and find that you and the head from other department have different opinions on what levels of roles should exist in our team.
- Keep Your Team Happy and Motivated
As an engineer, we want to know how we are being measured and how to reach the next level. Clearly outlining the path ahead is critical to keeping strong performers engaged and growing, and low performers to know where they are falling behind.
Sizing Factors
At Mekari we have something called Sizing factors, skills that are expected to be possessed by software engineering in order to grow their career. Mekari Tech Team Vision & Mission statements and Mekari Company Values are used as our north star on factors.
| Impact | System size and importance. Business Impact. Breadth/Depth orientation. Understanding how value is delivered based on the product goals of the team, product, and Mekari as a company. |
| Delivery | Showing initiatives, understanding when to get support, and estimating effectively. Contribution to team productivity. Effectiveness of software delivery – as evidenced by timeliness, quality, and success of meeting requirements/business objectives. |
| Communication | Being proactive, keeping others up to date. Getting buy-in and alignment to peers and non-technical stakeholders Improving communication channels, the flow of communication, and the ability to explaining work to peers and non-technical stakeholders |
| Leadership | Degree of independence. Level to which requirements are defined. Self-leadership, Emotional intelligence and empathy |
| Technical Skills | Innovation scope. Degree of difficulty, efficiency, extensibility, optimization to expect. Ability to deconstruct and simplify problems. Understanding of successful design, data structure, and algorithm patterns. Ability to make good decisions that consider the whole picture including balancing difficult short-term and long-term tradeoffs. |
| Mentorship & Independence | Influence over design, architecture, technical strategy, product features, etc. Degree of influence developing others and driving engineering best practices. Mentoring, Coaching, and identifying areas of improvement and progression. |
| Operational Excellence | Contributions to uptime, stability, scalability, and security. Processes and best practices to reduce incidents. Setting up appropriate metrics, monitors, and alerts. Improvement of the development process (i.e., package management, build, test, release/deploy, monitor, etc.). Focus on customer experience, software resilience, quality, maintainability, security. |
Ok, now we have one, great. What’s next ?
A lot of things we need to do together !
- Your manager needs to work with you and have growth conversations, if your manager haven’t start any discussion, please poke him/her 😌. Create a growth plan together by agreeing on a few areas where you haven’t yet been able to demonstrate the skills or proficiencies for the next level, and you want to focus on improvement.
- Use this framework to hire folks at the right employee grade. Create interview questions designed to tease out where someone is in relation to designated grade (grade that we want to hire), and hire them accordingly. Make it clear when we need give them an offer what grade they are being offered, and talk about the grade before they accept.
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