How the Figma design team level set on career leveling | Figma Blog
Figma revamped its product design and writing career levels after realizing its old one-page ladder no longer scaled with a growing, multi-product organization. The project began as an effort to define “craft” more clearly but expanded into a comprehensive framework for hiring, coaching, performance evaluation, and skill development. The resulting career levels emphasize concrete expectations, specialization at senior levels, and a visual, easier-to-use format in FigJam. ## Why Figma Revisited Its Career Framework - When Sara Culver joined Figma as a design manager in 2021, “craft” was widely considered essential to success, but teams disagreed on what it included. - Craft might mean: - Visual design - Prototyping - Motion or other specialized skills - Broader product design capabilities - The existing ladder had been created when Figma was smaller and covered areas such as: - Product strategy - Craft and quality - Mentorship and developing others - As the organization expanded, the document became too vague to support consistent coaching, evaluation, and hiring decisions. ## Research and Team Feedback - Culver surveyed designers about how they used the existing ladder and what they wanted from an updated version. - Designers asked for: - More detailed and concrete expectations - Clearer guidance for senior-level hiring and promotion - A stronger definition of craft at each level - The team questioned whether senior designers should be expected to excel equally in every skill or whether the framework should recognize “T-shaped” designers with broad abilities and deep expertise in one area. - Figma also reviewed career frameworks from companies including Slack, BuzzFeed, Meta, and Basecamp. - Designer Shana Hu provided extensive feedback and proposed a more visual FigJam-based format. ## Principles for the First Draft - The team created an inspiration board containing examples of career ladders and skills frameworks. - The proposed framework aimed to: - Group skills into clear areas - Replace rigid “ladder” language with “stages” or “levels” - Reflect the nonlinear nature of career growth - Use visual design to make expectations easier to scan and understand - Culver organized the framework around four core skill areas, with specific skills assigned to each area. ## Resulting Career Levels - Figma ultimately published new Product Design & Writing Career Levels alongside a Skills Widget. - The FigJam resource describes: - Expected performance at each level - Core competencies for product design and writing roles - Skills designers can develop over time - The framework is intended to help managers make better hiring and performance decisions while helping employees understand where to focus their growth. Figma’s approach suggests that career frameworks are most useful when they are specific, collaboratively developed, visually accessible, and flexible enough to recognize both broad capability and senior-level specialization.
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