Slalom Build Career Framework
Slalom Build had grown rapidly to over 1,000 technologists across multiple disciplines — software engineering, product management, design, data, cloud. Growth had outpaced the systems for developing and advancing people. Engineers didn't know what mastery looked like. Managers didn't have consistent language for feedback and promotion. Leaders didn't have a shared model of what 'great' meant at each level.
Design and deploy a career development framework that worked across an organization of 1,000+ technologists, multiple disciplines, distributed geographies, and widely varying project contexts. It needed to be specific enough to be useful and flexible enough to be honest about how messy real careers are.
We started with hundreds of conversations — with engineers at every level, with managers, with leaders. We resisted the temptation to build a framework first and validate later. The framework emerged from patterns in what people described as meaningful growth, meaningful feedback, and meaningful work. Competencies were written in first-person behavioral language, not abstract qualities.
- — Adopted across all Slalom Build practices and geographies
- — Competency-based progression system used for hiring, promotion, and development planning
- — Common language for feedback conversations across 1,000+ technologists
- — Significant reduction in promotion process ambiguity and perceived inconsistency