How Individuals Advance at Buffer, Without Becoming Managers

How Individuals Advance at Buffer, Without Becoming Managers – Open

The concept of a career path at Buffer has changed a lot over the past six years. We’ve gone through various phases as an organization: beginning as an early startup stage where everyone did a bit of everything, then to a period when we decided against having managers and leaned into a flat structure, and now to a lean level of management within a more traditional structure.

Currently, we’re a 75-person team. And we’re happy at that size. We have no short-term plans to grow the team any bigger.

As such, we’ve been asking ourselves, “What does a career path look like for someone at Buffer?”

Not everyone can be a manager, especially when the team isn’t expanding. So how does a teammate grow beyond his or her current role or, more specifically, grow horizontally instead of vertically?

To answer this, leaders on a few of our teams have put together formal career frameworks, which include growth opportunities beyond the traditional management track. We’d love for individual contributors to have an equal path for furthering their career and developing their skills. Here’s what we’re trying, what we’ve learned so far, and the frameworks that we’re using.

The Two Factors of Career Growth: Influence and Ownership (not Skills)

Career paths at Buffer aren’t skills based. This means that advancement isn’t based on a checklist of skills that everyone has to complete before moving to the next level.

Our Engineering Manager Katie explains this really well in her post about the Engineering framework:

Comparing a front-end engineer and a systems engineer and an iOS engineer using a checklist of specific skills didn’t lead to transparent and fair outcomes (or outcomes we could make much sense of at all). It also might encourage engineers to grow in artificial directions following a random checklist rather than their true interests.

The same goes for people working in marketing and in customer service.

Instead of skills, all of our frameworks focus on two things:

The scope of influence that a person has on their work, their team, the company, and the industry
The ownership that they have over their area

Scope of Influence

We think of scope of influence as how wide a person’s influence, or impact, is.

An easy way to visualize this is as the ripple effect. If Buffer as an organization were a pond, and ever individual contributor were a new stone in the pond, how far would their ripple go?

The one element missing from this metaphor is time. We expect it to take a lot of time for someone to be able to ripple quite far.

Scope of influence is measured by how much impact an individual contributor makes. Starting with influencing only their own tasks, to at the highest level, influencing not only their whole organization but their entire industry.

Here’s the breakdown of the scope of influence in a five-level framework:

Level 1 — Themselves and their tasks
Level 2 — Their projects and pace
Level 3 — Their area and strategy
Level 4 — Whole organization
Level 5 — Industry

This scope of influence concept is borrowed from Camille Fournier’s engineering ladder.

Ownership

The amount of ownership is how we attribute the level of responsibility that a person has within the team. For example, a teammate at Level 1 is just beginning and has no ownership of their area; a mentor, coach, or manager owns the area. A teammate at Level 5 exhibits ownership across the team and is accountable for the impact of his or her area and strategy.

This is what that looks like, level by level:

Level 1 — No ownership responsibility. Learning and being actively developed by others
Level 2 — Fully owns an area, channel, or discipline. Accountable for deliverables in that area.
Level 3 — Consistent record of very strong ownership for their area. Accountable for results in that area.
Level 4 — Exhibits ownership across the team, as it relates to the impact of their area. Accountable for executing on their area’s strategy.
Level 5 — Fully responsible for all aspects of their area. This person is rare. This takes an exceptional level of dedication to the craft and is a big jump from Level 4. Very few companies will have someone at this skill level.

The framework is also not a ladder. This means that we don’t expect that everyone will reach the highest level in the framework. Rather, we’re looking to focus on the entire career journey and growing in the direction that each person would like.

To borrow from Katie again:

At any one time, you’re simply at one particular point on your path. And no one stop ever describes the whole journey.

What Our Career Path Framework Looks Like

Our career paths are focused on individual contributors, as this is who makes up most of Buffer.

We don’t have paths for managers or coaches as it also only applies to fewer than 10 people on the team at the moment.

These career frameworks have been designed for our Engineering team (27 people), the Happiness team (19 people), and the Marketing team (9 people).

This specifically, is the framework that the Marketing team uses, with 5 levels. The Engineering and Happiness teams have a few additional levels as you’ll see below.

A quick overview of the career framework:

Level 1 — Expected to drive results with some support. They have experience in the role, can take responsibility, but are still learning the job and will have questions and need support. They can execute the tactical plan for a project but typically can’t make it.
Level 2 — Progress beyond 1 but not quite to 3
Level 3 — Expected to drive results with little or no supervision** (“set and forget”). These folks know how to do the job. They can make a project’s tactical plan in their sleep. They can work across the organization to get it done.
Level 4 — Progress beyond 3 but not quite to 5
Level 5 — Expected to make the plan. Your job is to understand the company’s business situation, understanding the marketing vision and goals, make a plan to address it, build consensus and get approval for that plan, then go execute it. The effect of the plan is likely to affect the whole industry. These people are rare.

We’ve added in timeframes for each of the transitions below because each of these advancements will take time.

The full career framework: