Career Roadmaps | liamfriedland

Grow Talent Strategically with Career Roadmaps

Originally published, UXmatters, January 2019

“Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.”

—Thomas Mann

As a young product designer, I worked hard to perfect my craft. I read widely, studied the work of the masters, and challenged myself. But I was also fortunate: My managers in those early years were good mentors. They gave me projects that would test me, as well as the autonomy to work, learn, and mess things up a bit. They looked out for me—assigning projects that were suitable for my skill level and helping me to avoid any serious mistakes. However, whenever I asked them what I needed to do to move up to the next level, they’d give me answers, but not a detailed career roadmap. What I was lacking was a comprehensive overview of the specific skills and objectives that would be necessary for me to make progress in the professional world of User Experience.

Although I was mastering the design skillset, I soon realized that this was not sufficient to take me where I ultimately wanted to go. Mastery of craft is simply not enough. It is also important to master the work context so we can design effectively within a product-development organization.

In other words, I also needed to learn about the business and its drivers, development processes, project planning, dependency management, and even organizational politics. Design school definitely had not prepared me for all of this. So, just as I’d done before, I began to read, study, learn, and master these other areas of competency. I also asked my managers to assign projects of progressively greater complexity and importance to me so I would have the opportunity to gain more experience, exposure, and autonomy.

As the years passed, I gained seniority. I led projects, mentored others, managed small teams, and architected product experiences. While my progress showed that I had apparently done the right things, nowhere along the way did I ever receive any sort of tangible roadmap for my career.

So, when the time came for me to form my own UX team at a mid-sized company, I was determined that the UX designers and researchers who joined my team would have clear roadmaps for their professional growth and development. I also wanted to ensure that our team would build deep bench strength by hiring talent that could continuously up level itself. My strong belief is that a UX organization should not have to look outside the company for its future senior talent and leadership.

Working with two other senior leaders on my team, we set about crafting a series of career roadmaps that described the necessary technical and organizational skillsets and their weightings for different levels of UX design, user research, and visual experience–design roles. These roadmaps covered all individual-contributor levels, starting at entry level and going all the way up to the most senior architects.

Each career-roadmap document that my team created comprised two sections, as follows:

The first section described the expected skill levels for each role’s technical and organizational skillsets, as well as the expected weightings for each skillset.
The second section provided detailed descriptions of four levels of each technical and organizational skill.

In the remainder of this column, I’ll provide an example roadmap for the UX-design career track. Then, I’ll share some advice on how individual contributors, managers, and leaders working in User Experience might utilize such career roadmaps.

An Example Career Roadmap

In this example, I’ll outline a roadmap for the UX-design career track. First, I’ll define the expected technical and organizational skill levels and skillset weightings for the various UX-design roles at four different levels. Then, I’ll provide detailed descriptions of four levels of each technical and organizational skill.

Section 1: Expected Skill Levels and Skillset Weightings

In this example career roadmap, the first table covers the technical, UX-design (UXD) skills that are necessary for six levels of UX-design roles, as well as the overall weightings of their technical skillset. The technical skills include information architecture, interaction design, UX research and user-centered design, visual design, and innovation.

The second table covers the organizational skills for UX-design roles, as well as the overall weightings of their organizational skillset. The organizational skills include decision-making, strategic thinking, planning and coordinating, results orientation, and communication.

The numbers in the tables represent the expected level of each skill for a particular UX-design role—from Level 1, beginner, to Level 4, master. The following general descriptions indicate the expectations for each level of expected contribution:

Level 1—Works as a product-team member, typically with a more senior person working in the same specialty who serves as a guide or mentor.
Level 2—Deals comfortably with typical projects and can work independently with only some high-level guidance or mentoring.
Level 3—Provides UX leadership to a product team, as well as some mentoring to Level-1 and Level-2 people working in the same specialty.
Level 4—Provides broad leadership and mentors groups, product teams, and the overall company.

In both tables, the weightings in the third column indicate the approximate ratios between the technical skills and the organizational skills. Note that the balance between these two types of skills shifts as a UX-design professional gains seniority.

Level 1—Works as a product-team member, typically with a more senior person working in the same specialty who serves as a guide or mentor.
Level 2—Deals comfortably with typical projects and can work independently with only some high-level guidance or mentoring.
Level 3—Provides UX leadership to a product team, as well as some mentoring to Level-1 and Level-2 people working in the same specialty.
Level 4—Provides broad leadership and mentors groups, product teams, and the overall company.

For example, a Principal UX Designer’s skill levels should emphasize technical skills, with a 70% weighting, versus just a 30% weighting for organizational skills. Plus, a Principal UX Designer should have Level-3 interaction-design and strategic-thinking skills.

In contrast, a UX Architect should have a more balanced, 60:40 ratio between technical and organizational skills, with higher levels of skill achievement in interaction design and strategic thinking—both at Level 4.

Section 2 - Technical and Organizational Skill Levels

The second section of the roadmap for the UX-design career track provides detailed descriptions of four levels of each of the technical and organizational skills. These skill-level descriptions provide precise guidelines for both individual contributors and their managers, giving them a clear understanding of the expectations for particular roles. Now, let’s look at the skillset levels for UX-design professionals in detail.

UX-Design Skillset Levels: Technical Skills

UX-design technical skills include information architecture, interaction design, UX research and user-centered design, visual design, and innovation. The following table describes four levels for each of these skillsets.

UX-Design Skillset Levels: Organizational Skills

UX-design organizational skills include decision-making and judgment, strategic thinking, planning and coordinating, results orientation, and communication. The following table describes four levels for each of these skillsets.

Download

This PDF file contains the level weightings and skill matrix tables in a printable, more readable format.

Advice for Individual Contributors in User Experience

To advance your own career, do the following:

Develop your own skillset. Focus on one skill area in which you’d like to grow, then work to achieve the next level by talking with more senior UX professionals, studying exemplary projects, and reading more broadly on the topic of interest.
Discuss your career with your manager. Use your career roadmap to guide regular discussions about your professional growth and ways in which your manager can support your growth—for example, through project assignments, formal mentoring, or even specific training courses.
Assess the maturity of any organization you’re joining. When interviewing for a job, formulate questions that are based on the technical and organizational skillsets I’ve outlined. You might also ask whether the company you’re considering joining has its own set of roadmaps.
Think several steps ahead. If you’re only a few years into your UX career or just starting out, the roadmaps let you see how your career might progress, help you to assess your strengths and areas for growth, and work to advance over time.

Advice for UX Managers and Leaders

To help your team members advance in their careers, do the following:

Define common reference points for your UX team members. Give them a single source of truth for the various career levels and job titles.
Have professional-development conversations with your team members. Guide them in all related career-development activities.
Work with Human Resources. Establish specific levels, competencies, and salary bands.
Assist team members with writing their performance reviews. Ensure you’re both on the same page regarding performance assessments.
Create job descriptions for all the roles on your team. Use them in recruiting and hiring.
Develop example-based hiring questions. These might cover specific skillsets and levels.
Drive growth and develop bench strength on your team. The primary function of a leader is to create more leaders. Having clear guidelines is helpful in conversations with your team members about how they can build strong careers over the long term.

In Conclusion

Let me be clear. I am not making any claims about the universal applicability of the roadmap I’ve presented here.

An enterprise-software company that builds business applications might prioritize skillsets and weightings differently from an ecommerce company or a company creating consumer products or medical devices. Company size and the maturity of your UX team will likely factor into this equation. Because of its unique business requirements, your organization almost certainly has its own slant on what skills are essential to an individual’s success in a particular role. However, none of this negates the benefits of this overall approach to systematizing career pathways. Creating career roadmaps enables UX designers and researchers to more effectively manage their professional growth over time.

The roadmap I’ve shared in this column provided good business value to both our UX team and our company. We believed that our roadmaps would stand the test of time, but also acknowledged that we should periodically revisit and update them whenever necessary.