Progression at Kwara 🎉

The progression framework is a tool that helps Kwarans and their managers:

1. make development and career plans
2. talk about what we’re looking for in a consistent way
3. set a fair level of compensation.

The framework is a compass, not a GPS. It’s meant to be helpful. It’s not meant to be a rating system for humans, free from edge cases.

How does it work?

The framework covers all the things we’re looking for from team members at Kwara. We’re interested in these five elements:

Mastery - Your Kwara knowledge and technical capability

Impact - The size, scope and value of what you deliver

Comms & Feedback - How you interact with others

Leadership - How people around you become better and more impactful

We sort them into six levels, and we try to give specific examples of behaviours we expect for each. Each of those levels has a fairly wide salary range associated with it, and within each level you can progress in sub-levels. So even if you’re at level 3 for a couple of years, you’ll still be able to see that you’re moving forward. Basically, the more behaviours you show from your level, the more you’ll progress.

Your manager will work with you on this. None of it will happen mysteriously behind closed doors. You’ll agree what level of progression you’re going for and what you need to improve on with your manager. It should be clear how you’re doing relative to that at all times.

Things to keep in mind

There are many different ways to progress and be valuable to Kwara as you grow, including deep technical knowledge and ability, technical leadership and people management. All are equally valuable paths in Kwara’s team.

The framework represents a career’s worth of progression, people shouldn’t expect to fly up it in 18 months!

Progression isn’t an exact science and there will always be some ambiguity.

This isn’t a checklist – it’s possible to progress up a level without showing all the behaviours in that level.

There will be levels on top (eg ‘Inventor of Android’ or ‘Author of Go’), but we won’t add them until we need them.

The levels do not directly correlate with your job title. It can be that you have a similar job title as others, but are on a higher or lower level of progression due to experience or growth you’ve gone through

Give us your feedback!

This is only the first version of our framework and we really want your feedback. We’re particularly keen to add as many examples to the behaviours as possible, to further clarify them.

Take a look around and let us know what you think! 🚀