Skills-Based Job Archi­tec­ture for a Prod­uct-Led Tech Company

The Problem

# Modernizing Outdated Tech Roles to Support a Product-Led Strategy

A Fortune 500 tech company engaged Propeller to standardize and modernize a core set of strategically important roles within their product and technology organization. Variability in role definition across the organization was preventing internal mobility and consistent process adoption, while some role expectations no longer aligned to emerging industry trends and required modernization to support delivery excellence within a new product-led organizational strategy. Additionally, in a recent engagement survey, employees demonstrated very low satisfaction with career advancement and promotion equity. Taken together, these factors motivated a larger investment to create the foundation for a skills-based job architecture refresh that would support the organization’s need for improved operational efficiency and talent alignment. ​

Our Approach

# Collaborative Alignment with Business and HR Leaders for Standardization

To standardize and modernize roles—in terms of the overall expectations and the skills needed for each—Propeller conducted a current state analysis to uncover how each role was operating and the degree of variability between business units. We also gathered industry benchmarks from dozens of interviews, surveys, and research, leading to a gap analysis report that highlighted areas of misalignment between our client and industry norms as demonstrated by peers. After aligning on a future state vision with executives in different role domains (Engineering, UX Design, Product, Program Management, and Data Science), we created custom role profiles to define high-level role expectations, followed by detailed competency matrices for each role, and a role-specific career guidebook to enable employees in career development planning. Throughout the process, we conducted two to three focus groups across five roles to ensure the materials resonated with employees, and to generate buy-in and support for the upcoming change. To support the implementation of the new role expectations for upcoming performance reviews, we developed a comprehensive change strategy including impact assessments, key messaging, HR integration plans, and a skills-based learning strategy.

# Services Provided

• Actionable Recommendations
• Career Pathing
• Change Management
• Competitive Benchmarking
• Job Architecture
• People Strategy
• Stakeholder Interviews
• Talent Strategy & Development

Value Delivered

# Enhancing Consistency and Equity in Role Expectations

The work Propeller delivered improved consistency, equity, and usability of role expectations in support of performance calibrations, career development, targeted learning and development investment, and talent acquisition priorities. Our client reported large increases in engagement scores relating to career development following the initial rollout of the first set of product manager role expectations. ​

By aligning these key roles to the new product-led organizational strategy, industry best practices, and client-specific operational and cultural norms, we enabled our client to improve their product development processes through enhanced role clarity and agility.