A Better Roadmap for Designer Growth
At Redfin, I led the refinement and launch of a new career ladder specifically designed for our product designers. The goal was to provide clearer guidance on growth and development, helping designers better understand the skills, responsibilities, and expectations at each stage of their careers.
Don’t throw out what’s working
Refining and launching the new career ladder at Redfin involved taking the best elements of our existing framework and aligning them with the new template being rolled out by the People team. We couldn’t just translate the old career ladder 1:1; instead, it required a complete rewrite to meet new goals and ensure it was both practical and standardized. We focused on capturing the essence of what worked in the original version, particularly the clarity it provided for designers, while reshaping it to fit the People team’s template.
The new career ladder needed to be a tool that would enable meaningful conversations between designers and design managers about growth and performance. It was crucial that the document wasn’t just a guide for promotion but a resource to support ongoing development discussions.
Creating the new career ladder at Redfin was truly a team effort among all the design managers, with each of us sharing responsibilities to ensure it was both comprehensive and aligned with the broader organizational goals.
I had previously designed a career ladder document for building teams at other organizations, which gave us a great starting point. It provided a solid foundation, outlining key areas for designer growth and development.
We collaborated closely, leveraging each manager’s insights to adapt the career ladder to be more meaningful for our design team. The focus was on ensuring it was a practical tool for conversations about growth and performance, while also fitting into the standardized template required by the People team. Through this collective effort, we were able to build something that was not only useful but aligned with the expectations across product, engineering, and design.
We followed a simple plan:
- Define business and designer needs: We started by identifying how the career ladder could support organizational goals while offering designers clear pathways for growth and performance improvement.
- Align skills and experience with product development and RED: We iterated on key competencies such as craft, leadership, and collaboration, ensuring they aligned with the product development process and expectations around what we defined as “Redfin Excellence in Design (RED).”
- Set levels of scope, involvement, and ownership: We clearly outlined expectations for each title, detailing responsibility, cross-functional involvement, and ownership from junior to senior roles.
- Created roadmaps for progression: Using these levels, we described what it looks like when a designer excels in their role and how they can move to the next level, offering guidance on areas for improvement and continued success.
Make growth conversations easier and more productive
We imagined what a conversation might look like between a manager and their supported product designer. We wanted to make sure that we all understood and agreed on key definitions of focus and skill areas. We created buckets or “pillars” that contained key skills in that area.
For example, one pillar was “Building a Knowledgeable Foundation” and within, each skill should help define what that pillar stood for. In this case, one of the skills beneath the pillar was “Customer Insight” which was described as “The relentless pursuit of understanding our customer’s needs in order to build accurate and actionable insights that we use to build valuable and loveable features.”
But what does that look like as a designer progresses in their career?
I wanted the management team, in their effort to help define each skill area and progression to follow a simple roadmap of progression – titles mean nothing without anchors in theme and scope.
Let’s take a deeper look at the Customer Insight skill.
As a junior designer, they should be learning under a supervised or curated scope:
- “[the designer] is eager to dive into Redfin learning materials, reach out and talk with more experienced teammates and connect with a few Redfin agents in their local area to learn more about our customers and how we service them in the field.”
A mid level product designer is delivering under a well learned skill:
- “[the designer] is capable of leveraging existing customer research materials, team knowledge, direct and indirect customer insights to help drive feature-level decisions and facilitate problem orientation when communicating these decisions to a team or stakeholder.”
A more senior designer can influence a much broader area across their team’s business area:
- “[the designer] is capable of guiding a team through insight discovery, leveraging several research and data gathering methods to add clarity to and even redefine customer archetypes, or micro insights that may create several pathways to designing what is right for a particular customer or customer journey”
As we worked on further flushing out the document, we got feedback from designers along the way. We scheduled several meetings with our HR business partners and leaders on the People team to make sure that our work was aligning to their much larger effort to bring the entire org under a single career ladder template.
As a tool for promotion readiness
We used the career ladder not only as a tool for growth but also to prepare a comprehensive promotion readiness document for designers. This document assessed a designer’s individual contributions across key areas:
- Project contributions: We evaluated how the designer contributed to their projects by assessing examples of problem-solving, creativity, and their impact on the product’s success. These were usually quantifiable and meaningful movements of a team’s driving metrics.
- Team collaboration: We reviewed how the designer collaborated with cross-functional teams, measured by their ability to influence stakeholders, lead discussions, and align with Redfin’s product development process.
- Design excellence: We measured their adherence to and promotion of design excellence through examples of high-quality work that aligned with both the company’s design system and values, ensuring the highest standards in user experience.
- Company culture: We assessed how the designer embodied Redfin’s values by fostering a positive team environment, mentoring others, and contributing to a culture of innovation and inclusion.
The career ladder document helped us tell a story behind the designer’s growth, rather than just a formatted list of accomplishments, we had the privilege of sharing our point of view through the lens of their whole career as a product designer, and not just metrics – as product designers, not every experiment ships, and not every design is a win for the business. It was important to us as managers, leaders in the organization, to be able to shape how a company values designers and the design craft.
What I learned as a leader
As a leader at Redfin, developing the career ladder and promotion readiness documents allowed me to gain valuable insights and improve my leadership approach. Here’s what I accomplished and learned throughout the process:
Strategic alignment: I successfully aligned individual growth paths with the company’s broader business goals, ensuring that each designer’s development directly contributed to Redfin’s success.
Cross-functional collaboration: I fostered collaboration with other managers and departments, such as product, engineering, and HR, making sure that the career ladder reflected the needs of all stakeholders across the organization.
Talent development: By creating clear, actionable growth pathways, I helped inspire and motivate designers, learning how to effectively nurture talent and prepare them for the next steps in their careers.
Feedback and communication: I honed my ability to provide structured, example-based feedback, ensuring that designers understood how their day-to-day work connected to their long-term goals and company values.
Standardization and fairness: I developed a stronger understanding of how to create fair, standardized evaluation criteria, ensuring transparency and consistency across the organization and fostering an inclusive environment where everyone knew what was expected.
This experience allowed me to not only strengthen my leadership skills but also create an impactful tool that aligned personal growth with the company’s success.