How DesignOps can Drive Inclusive Career Ladders for All
Summary
Key Insights
-
•
Salesforce’s UX career ladder includes about 180 unique skill attributes for design roles spanning six levels.
-
•
The team deliberately replaced vague terms like soft skills with clear, actionable language such as active listening.
-
•
Removing gender-coded language helped create more equitable and appealing career progression criteria.
-
•
Relationship design, a new DEI skill category, was added for all UX disciplines to highlight how work is done, not just what is done.
-
•
Relationship design consists of four interconnected mindsets: courage, compassion, intention, and reciprocity.
-
•
Senior UX employees are expected to hold difficult conversations, mentor others, and recognize power dynamics as part of relationship design.
-
•
The career competencies are tools for conversation, not strict checklists for promotion or scoring.
-
•
The competency updates were achieved over three years through an iterative and collaborative process involving volunteers across disciplines.
-
•
Education and adoption relied on resource guides, live walkthroughs, manager panels, and repeated organizational communication.
-
•
Salesforce’s UX career competencies map to broader company-wide competencies but remain tailored for UX-specific roles.
Notable Quotes
"Soft skills doesn’t always represent active listening, so we updated to be more specific."
"We wanted to be aware of extraversion, so words like energy were changed to initiative to not favor personality types."
"Gender-coded words influence someone’s decision to apply and feel they belong even within internal career ladders."
"Relationship design is not just what you do but how you do it, focusing on building relationships with customers, employees, and community."
"For early career UXers, compassion could be as simple as expressing gratitude for help."
"Senior employees should hold difficult conversations questioning processes that may be harmful to others."
"This is not a checklist or promotion tool; you don’t have to excel in everything to grow."
"If something was unclear or uncomfortable to even one person, it was a sign it needed editing."
"The competencies allow managers to celebrate individualism while maintaining consistency across teams."
"Adding inclusivity to the career ladder took three years and this is still a living document with room for change."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Avoid walls of text and create visual hierarchy to ensure scanability by using headers, sections, lists, and images."
Gabrielle VerderberDocumentation Your Team Will Actually Use
October 3, 2023
"Prototypes were very low fidelity because too-high fidelity can intimidate participants and hinder feedback."
Alexia Cohen Adriane AckermanIncreasing Health Equity and Improving the Service Experience for Under-Served Latine Communities in Arizona
December 4, 2024
"Two-thirds of our internal team had experienced a late or lost delivery, reflecting real customer frustration."
Anat Fintzi Rachel MinnicksDelivering at Scale: Making Traction with Resistant Partners
June 9, 2022
"Knowing generally where you’re going is not the same as having clearly articulated goals, objectives, and measurements for success."
Megan Nipe Lyndsay BoothHuman-Centered Design for Engagement: Maturing from Newsletterville to Personalized, One-to-One Messaging
December 8, 2021
"Being a design ops team of one is automatically set to heart mode."
Jackie AjouxLeveling-Up: A Single-Player’s Guide to the DesignOps Team-of-One
January 8, 2024
"When you go to a physician, you trust their diagnosis and treatment, not just the tests they order."
Aras Bilgen Ari ZelmanowResearch Democratization: A Debate
March 29, 2023
"Nobody loves it when someone from another department shows up to tell people how to do their jobs better."
Laura KleinUnique challenges of innovation in enterprises
April 23, 2020
"There’s a lot of different experiences that make me okay with some parts of the world, and others don’t make sense to me."
B. Pagels-MinorBreaking the Tension: The Power of Enabling Your Employees to Show Up Authentically
June 10, 2022
"The leadership gave five million bucks and said show me value in six months or we won’t give you the rest."
Jeff GothelfThe Intersection of Lean and Design
January 10, 2019
