When leveling criteria is fuzzy, teams get lost.

Context

A design team with no shared definition of growth.

My restaurant experience team sat within a larger Grubhub design organization (senior and mid-level product designers, plus indirect management of user research and content strategy). The team was capable and motivated. But after the 2019 year-end review cycle, a pattern emerged that was hard to ignore.

Three things were consistently true across the team:

• 01Leveling criteria was fuzzy. Team members and managers had misaligned expectations on what each role required. What counted as "senior" design work wasn't clearly defined, so the definition shifted depending on who was doing the evaluating.
• 02Year-end goals were disconnected from design performance. Individual performance reviews were tied to product metrics, not to growth as a designer. There was no framework for recognizing or coaching craft, communication, or leadership development.
• 03Expectations were unclear, and the surprises were bad ones. Team members were blindsided when they weren't promoted or when they learned they weren't meeting expectations. That's a management failure, not a designer failure.

The Opportunity

Two questions that needed answering before anything else.

How might we create a comprehensive design leveling guide that provides clarity, consistency, and visibility around team evaluations?

How might we better support more senior team members as their responsibilities become increasingly abstract?

The second question was the harder one. Junior and mid-level roles are easier to define: the work is concrete. As designers grow into senior and staff levels, the expectations become less about execution and more about influence, communication, and strategic impact. Those things are harder to articulate, which is exactly why they tend to stay fuzzy.

Research & Benchmarking

We looked outside before we built anything.

Before writing a single expectation, we benchmarked how other design organizations evaluated their teams. We wanted the growth guide to reflect industry-level expectations, not just internal preferences, so that it would feel credible to designers who had experience at other companies and hold up against external hiring benchmarks.

The research converged on three guiding principles:

The Work

We built the MVP in a Google Doc. On purpose.

Speed to the next review cycle was a real constraint. We needed something in designers' hands before mid-year reviews, which meant shipping something good quickly over waiting to build something perfect.

The process: map out the key responsibilities of each role group across the design organization, identify core competencies that scaled from IC to senior to staff, define what "meeting expectations" and "exceeding expectations" looked like at each level, and build a self-assessment worksheet alongside the criteria.

We shipped it as a Google Doc. Intentionally. It was accessible, shareable, easy to update, and didn't require engineering resources to launch. The spreadsheet format for the self-assessment worksheet turned out to work well: concrete, structured, and easy to fill out ahead of a 1:1.