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
"If you cannot remove a treatment, it may not be a true cause."
Joshua NobleCasual Inference
October 6, 2023
"Failure is easy, recovery is hard, but it’s necessary and part of the process."
Maria GiudiceEmpowering change: Reigniting purpose, passion and impact in research
March 13, 2025
"Don’t tell government teams you’re using design thinking—use their language and let them experience it first."
Steve ChaparroBringing Into Alignment Brand, Culture and Space
August 13, 2020
"Large companies demand certainty, but certainty is the opposite of innovation."
Laura KleinUnique challenges of innovation in enterprises
April 23, 2020
"Space has meaning in a map — moving components changes the map's meaning, unlike diagrams where space is arbitrary."
Simon WardleyMaps and Topographical Intelligence
January 31, 2019
"Researchers often treat users as checkboxes, going in, doing research, checking the box and leaving."
Prayag Narula Rida QadriHCI 2.0: Humanity Deserves the Attention that UX Research has to Offer
March 28, 2023
"Throw away the rule book in early ideation phases to get as many ideas out as fast as possible."
Billy CarlsonIdeation tips for Product Managers
December 6, 2022
"Everything touched by AI becomes synthetic and needs persistent labeling."
Patrizia BertiniDesigning Within the Lines: How the EU AI Act Can Spark Better AI Innovation
December 11, 2025
"It’s about us, the design ops practitioners, and what we need today to be better at our jobs."
Bria AlexanderTheme Two Intro
October 3, 2023
