When building a high-performing engineering team, defining a clear and effective career framework is one of the most critical undertakings. At WHOOP, we recently revamped our engineering career framework to ensure it reflects not just a progression ladder but a realistic and inspirational guide for engineers and engineering managers to navigate their careers. This blog post explores why this effort was vital, the challenges we faced, and the solutions we implemented to craft a framework that aligns with WHOOP's culture and operational expectations.
Why the Career Framework Matters
A career framework provides clarity on roles, expectations, and growth paths. It’s more than a set of guidelines; it’s a shared language that:
- Encourages creativity: By avoiding rigidity, the framework empowers individuals to shape their careers uniquely and balances a common understanding.
- Promotes consistency: A common understanding of performance levels ensures fairness and alignment in level expectations.
- Supports growth: It serves as a roadmap for personal and professional development.
Unlike traditional ladders, the WHOOP career framework not only seeks to capture what it truly means to operate at each role level but also to preserve creativity while maintaining clear, commonly understood benchmarks for advancement.
Challenges in Building the Framework
Striking the Right Format
Early iterations were overly rigid. For instance, our previous framework relied heavily on bullet points, which were often interpreted as literal checklists for advancement. This approach stifled creativity and led to a “must-do one-time” mindset rather than encouraging diverse ways of meeting role expectations and really embodying the expectation of continued operation at the next level. This resulted in a large disconnect when it came time to decide whether the person is ready for promotion, our people leaned in too heavily into checkmark each box/bullet rather than shifting towards continued impact at the next level..
Depicting Breadth of Impact
Conveying the progression in breadth and focus area across levels was challenging. Descriptions often felt abstract, and users found it hard to distinguish the shifts between levels. We even experimented with removing this aspect but realized its absence created even more confusion.
Iterative Approach to a Better Framework
At WHOOP, we approached this challenge as we would any product development initiative: through iteration and data collection.
Data-Driven Iteration to the Right Format
We tested multiple formats with engineers and engineering managers, gathering feedback at every stage. By incorporating their insights, we crafted a framework tailored to how WHOOP engineers perceive their roles and growth. Balancing structure with flexibility, we ended up adopting a format that combined analogies to compare levels, role definitions, and consistent categories at each level within the roles.
We introduced descriptive example behaviors to complement the structured content, intended to create space for personal creativity in each category but also provide a way to kickstart your thinking about how to operate at each level. We also made sure to emphasize that these are example behaviors and that they are not all-encompassing nor stringent, but rather that the spirit of them needs to be represented at each level.
Ultimately, we learned that this balance leads to people finding their own way of having impact that better fits the way they like to operate. And we found that if they like the way they operate they tend to embody that behavior more consistently over their career and build on it rather than pursuing checking off a box one time.
Consistency Across Levels
We found that consistency across each level within a role and even across roles was important for comparison and aligned communication. We defined the following categories and depicted through each level how they change, each level building on top of the last.
- Scope: Defines the expected area of impact and ownership.
- Craft: Outlines technical execution and delivery expectations.
- Communication & Collaboration: Sets teamwork and communication standards.
- Coaching: Encourages contributions to team growth.
- Strategy & Execution: Focuses on long-term goal setting and delivery.
- Moving to the Next Level: Offers guidance for progression, including time expectations and focus areas.
This had a large impact on guiding calibration conversations during review season and in planning growth areas for individuals. This common language is now core at WHOOP when discussing impact and performance.
The Game-Changer: Visualizing Breadth of Impact
SWE3 Senior Engineer Scope of Impact
One of the most transformative elements of the framework is a visual diagram that evolves with each level. This depiction of breadth of impact provides a clear and intuitive understanding of where and how behaviors should manifest. In user testing, this feature emerged as the most significant clarity driver, helping individuals better align their efforts with the expectations of their current and aspirational levels. If we were to distill the framework into one element, it would be this visual representation. It serves as the anchor, grounding each level in an easily digestible and actionable format.
How we use the framework at WHOOP today
Today, WHOOP uses this career framework to guide individual growth throughout the year. It is used in 1:1 meetings between managers and individual contributors. It is used in calibration meetings for managers to guide consistent and equitable performance reviews. And most importantly it serves as a transparent way to see what career growth looks like at WHOOP.
Final Thoughts
Building a career framework for engineers is no small task. At WHOOP, we approached it iteratively, focused on user-centric testing to embody our culture and clarity, refined over and over again, and re-testing until we landed on a format that resonated with our team. The result is a framework that reflects our culture, supports individual creativity, and clearly communicates what it means to operate at each level at WHOOP. This journey taught us that a career framework is not just a tool for growth but a product in itself, requiring the same care, thoughtfulness, and iteration as any engineering project. And much like our engineering philosophy at WHOOP, it’s designed to evolve as we learn and grow together. We hope that opening it up to the public provides transparency to those interested in joining the WHOOP team!