What are you working on this week, Reader?

I'm in the middle of creating a career level framework for the Brand Studio team, and I thought you might find it interesting to see how I'm approaching it – especially since I'm using AI pretty heavily in the process.

The context

We recently moved to Lattice for performance management, and our Head of People Ops created a general career levels framework for individual contributors at Kit, covering the expectations we have for skills and competencies like ownership, project management and feedback across levels 1-6.

Each manager is expected to customize it with the functional skills specific to their team. So I need to add in a set of competencies to communicate the expectations I have for the creative professionals on my team and the ways they approach their brand work.

(Side note: We did have a levels matrix before on the Brand Studio team, but this project is about aligning expectations across the entire company.)

My process

I started by feeding Claude a bunch of context: the general framework, examples from other teams, info about the Brand Studio's responsibilities, plus the previous matrix I had created for each role on my team.

Then I asked it to suggest around 10 functional skills I might want to include (knowing that I wanted to end up with 3-5, but seeing a longer list helps clarify my thinking).

I settled on these 5 competencies that felt important to set expectations around and covered the details of what I expect from my team no matter what their creative discipline is (this matrix will apply to the Brand Designers, Motion Designer and Copywriter on the Brand Studio team).

• Strategic Creative Thinking
• Brand Consistency and Evolution
• Research and Testing
• Creative Craft
• Systems Building

Then I had Claude create an initial draft for levels 1-6 across those 5 skills, using all the context I'd given it as reference points.

The output was surprisingly good – it picked up on the nuances between levels quite well, giving me a solid first draft to work from. But of course, there were a lot of edits I wanted to make, which is where my favourite process discovery of this experience comes in...

For giving feedback, I used an AI tool called Superwhisper for dictation. I read through Claude's draft and just spoke my thoughts out loud as I went – "this part works, this needs to be more specific, this doesn't sound right for level 3..."

Instead of reading, thinking, then typing feedback, I was just reacting in real time! It sped things up significantly.

The tricky parts

I really struggled with defining level 6 (basically a Principal level). We don't have examples of this role in our company yet, so I was trying to write expectations for something theoretical and it wasn't feeling right. (In the end, I decided to leave it out for now since no one on my team is at or near that level anyway, and I'll look to add it in sometime next year.)

Also, getting Claude to format things as a spreadsheet was weirdly difficult? And it seems the table structure confused the AI too cos it would constantly say it had made changes, but they wouldn't show up in the table so I'd have to ask it to try again... In hindsight, I'd just work in doc format next time. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Where things stand now

I shared the draft with our Head of People Ops for feedback and she gave me some really helpful notes. Overall she said levels 1, 2, and 5 were well aligned with company standards, but levels 3 and 4 were anchored a bit too low. She also pointed out that one of my competencies (Systems Building) might be too similar to what's already in the general framework.

So now I need to:

• Adjust levels 3 and 4 upward
• Either refine the systems building language to be more brand-specific, or decide the general definition covers what I need
• Share it with my team and get their input

What I'm learning

This whole process is making me think about how AI can handle the heavy lifting of first drafts when you give it good context, but the real work is in the iteration and refinement. The human judgment about what feels right for your specific team and culture – that's still very much on you.

I'll share the final matrix with you once it's done if you're interested in seeing how it turned out!

What's your experience been with creating or working within career frameworks? Hit reply and let me know – I'm always curious how other teams approach this.

Talk soon,

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