Lessons on creating an engineering ladder

1. Moving Towards Structure
Camille Fournier
CTO, Rent the Runway
@skamille

2. My Story
• Grew Rent the Runway’s engineering team
from ~12 to 55 and counting

3. My Organizational Goals
• To create a relatively meritocratic
environment
• To limit bias
• To develop the leadership talent on my team
• To hire a diverse workforce

4. Flat
• We start flat, except of course for “the
founders” or perhaps “the executives”
• First you have 3 directs
• Then 5
• Then 10
• Then… you start to break down

5. Time to add some structure!
• Maybe I’ll hire a VP of Engineering!

6. How about a Tech Lead?
• Great I’ll take my most senior/favorite dev and
make them “Tech Lead” of some of the
software

7. Perhaps a Director of Engineering
• Not quite VP, not quite Tech Lead

8. Either way, your flat is dead
• It was never true anyway, so it’s probably for
the best

9. What does this new leader DO?
• They make my life easier, of course!

10. No, really
• I dunno. They handle…
– Project Management!
– People Management for part of the team!
– All Management so I don’t have to!
– Architecture!

11. If you don’t know, you’re set up to fail
• Inevitably, this person is going to not read
your mind exactly the way you wish they did
• How do you know whether they’re
incompetent or just confused?
• How do you hold them accountable when you
don’t know what they’re SUPPOSED to be
doing?

12. “They’ll define the role themselves!”
• If you hire someone who has done this job
before and you have a shared context, that
might be ok
– IE, you both worked for Google, and you hired a
senior manager at Google to be a Director of
Engineering

13. A bad, but common, case
• HR hires people with random titles based on
what you said you needed to hire
• “Frontend Engineer”
• “Lead DevOps”
• “iOS Specialist”
• Pay people directly based on experience and
whatever HR magic formula

14. Creating Clarity
The minute you create hierarchy, you
need clarity

15. The Engineer Ladder: What
• The list of job levels and the description of
what goes in each of those levels
• BEST PRACTICE: Above Senior Engineer, has a
separate path for “Manager” vs “Individual
Contributor”
• A device to create clarity on your team and, if
done well, limit bias

16. The Engineering Ladder: Why
• Gives you a framework for hiring, paying,
promoting
• Forces you to become more clear in what you
expect from people
• Forces you to push that clarity into your hiring
process and possibly hire better
• Gives your team a growth path that helps
them imagine their future with you

17. Creating an Engineering Ladder
• Step 1: Ask your friends for theirs
– Step 0: Make friends with people who have teams
big enough to justify a ladder
• Step 2: Be realistic about how it applies to
your team
– You may not need all the levels. You may need
more levels.
• Write it up. Get feedback. Rewrite it.
• Share it.

18. I really don’t want to do this
Why not?

19. I’m afraid everyone will be clamoring
for titles
• They probably will when you roll this out BUT
• This gives you the chance to make it clear to
them what success looks like!
• Give them something to work towards!
• Give you both a framework for talking about
how they are succeeding and how they are
not

20. Expect some anxiety
• Ladder rollouts do generate anxiety around
upward mobility
• On the flip side, with no ladder, people that
care about upward mobility leave for a better
title elsewhere

21. I’m afraid people will think they should
be promoted who aren’t ready
• Well then, that is why you need to be very
clear about what you expect at each level
• People will want to be promoted with or
without a ladder, if you have any sort of
leadership
• They’ll also want bigger pay, more options,
bigger projects
• How do you determine who gets what?

22. I’m afraid titles will cause us to lose
voices of others
• It takes more than “no titles” to ensure that
voices are actually heard

23. There are more paths to excellence
than climbing a ladder!
• True! And a ladder doesn’t take the place of
other training
• Embrace add-ons, badges, specialties

24. Premature optimization!
• True. You probably don’t need to do this when
you have only 1 non-founder/executive
“leader”
• But the minute you need 2…

25. Your vibe is a function of your company values and culture
Do you know what your company values are?
It is very possible to design a ladder to reflect and reward those values
WHAT ABOUT MY VIBE?

26. I’m the CTO, this isn’t my job!
• Like hell it isn’t
• If you are very lucky, you might find a VPE to
do this for you
– I would not hold my breath
• This isn’t rocket science. If you can architect a
system, you can architect a team.

27. Conclusion
• Clarity Clarity Clarity
• Clarity