Role: Senior Engineering Manager · Company: CarTrawler
Starting point
CarTrawler’s engineers had no formal career structure. Promotions were inconsistent, performance conversations had no shared language, and a senior engineer could not tell you what separated them from staff or principal. Managers were making levelling calls without common criteria, which meant the same work could be judged differently depending on who your manager was.
The constraint I set myself
It had to feel fair and useful to engineers, not like a bureaucratic exercise imposed from above. Many of them were sceptical of top-down process for good reasons. If the framework arrived finished and unarguable, it would be quietly ignored.
How it was built
- Workshops with engineers at different levels to define what good looked like at each stage, in their words.
- Cross-referenced several public levelling frameworks and adapted them to CarTrawler’s context rather than copying one.
- Draft reviews with tech leads and managers before any formal rollout.
- Named it v1 explicitly. That one word did a lot of work: it told people it would change, and that their feedback would change it.
What it gave people
Engineers got a concrete development path and reported more agency over their growth. Managers got consistent language for performance and promotion conversations. Calibration sessions became more structured and noticeably less contentious. The framework is still the basis for career progression at CarTrawler.