Intro

These are the skills that we choose to focus on at UpMail.

These pages are used for conversations about growth, promotions, pay and hiring. Individual staff will discuss these with their line manager to track goals, promotions and salaries.

How to read this framework

There are 6 subjects, each with a rating of 1 to 5.

Levels 1-2 indicate a “getting started” path: learning the ropes, using lots of support from your peers, and usually with mentorship or training involved.

Level “3” means a productive and independent level of skill. You can get on with moderately complicated tasks, needing little input from others, and produce good results.

Levels 4-5 indicate leadership outside your personal influence, the ability to inform and improve team and company practices, and a level of very high skill.

Communication & Documentation

  1. Getting started. Learning how async communication works. Understands that we operate in a blameless & low-ego way, but is still getting used to how that feels.
  2. Can usually follow our team processes, but still needs practice in some areas of communication and documentation.
  3. Consistent use of clear, precise language in communication. Personal use of good async practices. Attention to detail when following team workflows (such as bug write-ups). Consistently prioritises long-form writing over ephemeral chat. Can deliver and receive blameless, non-violent feedback.
  4. Same as level 3, but in a leadership capacity.
  5. Same as level 4, but at a company-wide level.

Pragmatism, agile principles

We are a small startup. This means we have to aim for engineering reliability through simplicity, predictability and lack of magic. For example Choosing Boring Technology, building fewer things, simplifying requirements, etc.