Consistent roles, hiring and promotions

Open guidance for team growth and what to expect from each other

We’ve created open job descriptions and role guidance for all UCD roles at Made Tech.

For example, for Senior Content Designers, we have:

• Job description (including salary bands)

• Role guidance

All this information is in our open company handbook on GitHub.

We wanted to say why it’s important we spent time creating and opening up this information about our different UCD roles.

Consistent hiring

It’s vital we’re consistent in who we offer jobs to. We believe having open job descriptions, and role guidance will help us do this.

Firstly, it’s about making sure we’re fair to those we don’t make an offer to. Regardless of who conducts the interview, the decision should be based on the same criteria. Hiring is never gonna be totally objective, but we must try and shared criteria should help with doing that. 

Next, consistent hiring decisions are fair on people already in the team. Say if someone joining had very different abilities and maturity to another person doing the same role, that’s gonna create confusion and probably resentment too.

Lastly and most importantly, we need to make sure we consistently bring people into the team who are able to do their roles well. Job descriptions and role guidance won’t make decisions for us; ultimately, that’s down to hiring managers’ judgement. However, they do already help us quality control our decision making. Forming a basis for designing interview formats and providing a framework when discussing whether to make a job offer or not.

Clearer roles expectations

It needs to be clear what people should expect from themselves and others doing different roles at Made Tech.

For example, what to expect from:

• a role you’re thinking of applying for

• a role you’ve just started doing in your new job

• the role someone you line manage does

• a new teammate doing a role you’ve not worked with before

• a role you see a teammate is maybe struggling with parts of

• a role you’re interested in getting promoted into

• a role a client is asking to have as part of a new service team

Having open job descriptions and role guidance means we have the same information to refer to these situations. This alone won’t set all the expectations with past experience and others around us doing these roles already playing a big part too.

Career paths and progression

We want it to be easy for people to see what opportunities at Made Tech for learning, growth and progression. Designers and researchers often quit jobs because it’s unclear when and where they’ll learn, grow, and progress.

Job descriptions help show what career paths and progression opportunities there are currently at Made Tech. Role guidance helps illustrate with examples what skills and behaviours someone needs to show to move into a new role. This really helps inform line management, goal setting, coaching and scheduling people into new teams with clients.

And now with our UCD academy beginning in May, where people will start their design careers with us, it’s even more important they can see career paths in front of them.

Pay rises and promotions

Intimately tied with career progression are pay raises and promotions. Open job descriptions and role guidance aim to make it clearer what evidence someone and their manager need to bring together when going for a pay rise or promotion.

We’re working to make the whole pay and promotion process clearer. We will go into this in more detail in a separate post.

Version one, never done

These job descriptions and role guidance will never be done. We will get team feedback and learn by doing whether they help us do the things we’ve mentioned. They will evolve as our teams’ size and shape change. We’ll make changes big and small.

We’ve gone from zero to 30 people in ten months and many of the roles we do didn’t exist in their current form 10-15 years ago. How we describe UCD roles must change as the jobs themselves do. 

If you’ve got feedback:

• DM us on Twitter or Slack

• Add an issue on GitHub

• Talk with us in a group discussion or one-to-one if you’re in our team at Made Tech

Annie, Emma, Jon and Harry are part of the user-centred community at Made Tech.