Revamping the Engineering Career Track at SSENSE

SSENSE is a fast-growing fashion tech company that has tripled in size over the past 3 years to a team of over 600 people. A common challenge for most companies — especially those in hypergrowth like SSENSE where we employ a diverse range of expertise and place a high priority on professional development — is to establish clearly defined and sustainable career tracks that support the long term success of employees. As more experienced team members take on new challenges and new team members join at a high frequency, a lack of clearly defined career tracks can lead to unclear roles, responsibilities, and career progression.

When I first joined SSENSE in January 2017 as a Director of Application Development, I started by conducting roughly 20 in-depth discussions to get a sense of the performance and health of the Engineering department. At the time, we were 45 engineers; we have since grown to 100.

In every single discussion we had, engineers mentioned career tracks as a source of uncertainty. They raised questions that will sound familiar to many readers working in relatively young (SSENSE was founded in 2003), fast-paced, and high growth companies:

When the department is still small, you can manage careers without a clearly defined ladder. In fact, if your employees are willing to accept some inconsistent titles, the system can be sustained for surprisingly long periods of time. In our case, we had ‘Frontend Developers’, ‘Software Developers’, and ‘Web Developers’ — all of whom were performing similar, if not identical tasks.

Given our rate of growth and the size of the department at the end of 2017, we had reached a point where these titles became disconnected from the reality of our day to day and our actual career paths were no longer satisfactory. This led not only to inconsistencies in titles, but shortcomings such as:

It was time to revamp the career path for our engineers. Changing career tracks in a tech organization is significant. It impacts how you hire people, how you evaluate their performance, and how people progress in their career. It can drive up the rate of attrition if the ladder is not clear or motivating. Moreover, career tracks and associated job descriptions are an opportunity to influence the culture you want to put in place.

So how do you define the right titles? Following is the approach we took to defining a more robust and clear career progression at SSENSE for individual contributors in Engineering who wanted to progress without entering management.

We chose a task force approach to define the best solution and facilitate its adoption. We gathered more than 10 engineers (developers, QA, DevOps) interested in dedicating some time to this topic.

Over the course of a few months, we conducted roughly eight workshops. While the task force approach has many benefits, it comes with challenges such as receiving suggestions for individual circumstances and not the department, low engagement during the session, etc. Three factors successfully drove the group forward:

For a few sessions, we even invited our Chief Operating Officer to join our discussions and challenge us. This helped make the importance of this initiative clear to all participants.

In parallel, we worked with our HR team to understand internal requirements to ensure we remained consistent across all SSENSE departments. Finally, we benchmarked a few tech companies to identify best practices (see the source section for some good reads).

We confirmed three possible career paths: Individual Contributor, Manager, and Subject Matter Expert. We decided to first tackle the Individual Contributor career paths as this represented the majority of our headcount.

Our third design principle helped us structure the progression around the breadth of impact expected at any given level of seniority — ranging from recent graduates whose focus would be on ramping up as individuals, to our most senior developers who would be expected to lead initiatives that impact the department, or the company as a whole.

When combining the two previous charts the result is the ladder structure below:

As you might notice from the diagram, we decided to change the ‘Tech Lead’ title to a role that can be taken at the senior and staff level. It avoids creating an unnecessary bottleneck in our ladder and gives our developers and QA testers the opportunity to try this role more easily. However, it also creates its own set of challenges such as finding a strategy to compensate people taking on this role.

After finalizing the ladder, we worked with the department’s managers to update all corresponding job descriptions. Once completed, it was time to roll out the new career track. While the new track is imposed on everyone in the Engineering department, ensuring smooth adoption and support remains critical to keeping motivation high and attrition low.

Providing as much visibility as possible during the process is imperative to the implementation. We regularly communicated updates in our department’s ‘All-Hands’ meetings, and the final ladder and job descriptions were shared months before its implementation. Additionally, town halls were held to present and explain the new career track in more detail, answer any questions, and distribute job descriptions. The fact that more than ten people were involved in making the ladder helped with its positive reception.

The last and most sensitive step was to map current titles to new ones. We did not always find a one to one relationship, causing some employees who shared the same title previously, to end up with different titles following the implementation. We used our regular performance evaluation cycle to review this mapping with employees. As part of this cycle, all managers, directors, as well as our Chief Technology Officer gathered for calibration meetings for two days to review the individual performance of all employees in the department. We also evaluated their performance in relation to their previous job descriptions to ensure fairness. We can’t hold employees accountable for expectations that were not set before the start of the quarter. However, we also mapped each person to the new title and gave feedback based on their new job descriptions to highlight what they should work on for the next evaluation cycle in six months.

The SSENSE Engineering department has now successfully integrated the new job titles and ladder for the past nine months. Using a formal career ladder with robust job descriptions has yielded tangible benefits. This framework helps our managers set clear expectations for the engineers they manage, give more specific and fact-based feedback, and guide them in preparing for calibration meetings. In a growing organization with more than 100 engineers and several managers, it also ensures a standardized and fair approach to evaluation. As for engineers, it helps them better understand what is expected of them at their current level and motivates them to grow towards the next one.

One risk we need to mitigate is that a job’s description might be misconstrued as an exhaustive checklist. This could lead to situations wherein employees are left wondering why they did not get promoted despite checking all the boxes. It is management’s responsibility to clearly communicate that the decision to promote accounts for factors that cannot be objectively defined as a checklist, such as attitude towards collaboration, accountability etc. Another trap to avoid is directly copying and pasting the position description over to the job posting. Instead, pull the key tasks and responsibilities you’ve defined, communicate them in an engaging manner, and showcase your company’s culture and history.

If you are considering restructuring career tracks in your organization, I advise against duplicating another company’s ladder and/or job descriptions. Career tracks can deeply influence your company’s culture and they must be uniquely adjusted to the existing ecosystem. I recommend researching the subject thoroughly (see ‘Further Readings’ as a starting point), then taking a step back to organize your thoughts and identify the mindset, behaviors and skills your organization needs in order to be successful. Your career tracks should align with these needs. Finally, the implementation needs to be very carefully planned. Poor execution can create frustration, undermine your culture, and ultimately lead to unwanted attrition. If implemented well, your career tracks will prove to be a critical asset in structuring and growing your company.

Editorial reviews by Deanna Chow, Liela Touré & Prateek Sanyal

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