Overview

Background

From our earliest days, we were very clear that Rocketium's responsibility is to enable continuous learning and growth for everyone in the team. We were careful about defining roles and responsibilities granularly so everyone can focus on being excellent in one area before expanding into more areas. This helped in our hiring process and regular performance discussions.

However, as the team grew, we felt the need to define career paths so everyone has clarity about what it takes to be excellent in each area. This helps in creating a six-month or longer roadmap. Identify areas where we are already strong and those that need work becomes obvious. Promotions, role changes, and hikes become more objective.

How we created our career paths

We followed these steps to create our career paths:-

1. Research - We reviewed job postings of other companies to see common patterns in designations, roles, responsibilities, and requirements. We read articles about career paths for individual departments. Time taken: 4 days

2. 1:1 conversations - We spoke with founders and operators from other companies to learn more about how they do this today, how they have evolved, and what they are still lacking. Time taken: 2 days

3. First principles thinking - We neither wanted to reinvent the wheel nor did we want to use something ill-suited to our culture. We thought of the lifecycle of each department and used it to come up with broad areas of impact. Time taken: 5 days

4. Feedback - Once we had the first draft of the career paths, we shared it with the team to get their inputs on how we can improve. We also shared it with experts in our network for their suggestions. Finally, we are open-sourcing our career paths for the community's inputs. 😀 Time taken: 2 days

Common areas of focus across teams

Knowledge

• Junior - Be familiar with our product capabilities, new features, and changes. Get to know competing offerings, both direct and indirect. Be aware of industry trends through reading and expert interactions. Learn different customer use-cases and success stories

• Mid-level - Regularly interact with other teams to know upcoming product and process changes. Participate in customer conversations to improve understanding of their needs, vocabulary, and decision-making criteria. Interact with peers from other companies to learn how they work and challenges they face.

• Senior - Bring in industry veterans and experts to increase your and the team's knowledge of products, competitors, and industry. Regularly benchmark our products against competitors to keep us competitive. Be known as an industry expert in a few areas.

Process

• Junior - Follow the processes laid out by your team. Share feedback to improve the processes in your team. Be open to feedback and seek it out from your team. Be clear about the goals and success metrics before you start anything.

• Mid-level - Train the team to follow the process. Regularly share feedback within the team to help them improve how they work. Conduct regular introspection to seek feedback from the rest of the team. Set clear goals and success metrics for every project by discussing with other teams and customers.

• Senior - Identify bottlenecks in productivity. Design processes to remove these bottlenecks. Find ways to improve inter-team collaboration. Regularly measure and improve processes across teams.

Team

• Junior - Be a positive, enthusiastic teammate. Show ownership of areas you have picked up and deliver. Communicate regularly and often, especially with bad news. Share feedback and course corrections if you think we are in the wrong direction.

• Mid-level - Set high expectations from teammates. Be a positive role model who inspires their team. Participate in the hiring process and ensure we build a great team. Mentor junior teammates and ensure they are successful. Resolve conflicts within the team.

• Senior - Set challenging goals for teams that push them to work better. Build a mindset in the team of teamwork, customer orientation, excellence, and focus. Create awareness about our culture, work, and benefits to build a strong talent pipeline. Help individual teammates create a strong brand for themselves. Ensure teams are happy, motivated, and productive.