As Clockwork evolved and the design team expanded, it became clear that the organization lacked a foundational structure to support designer growth, performance evaluation, and alignment in hiring. Designers often asked:
Without a shared framework, expectations were inconsistent across managers, performance reviews lacked structure, and career progression felt subjective.
To solve this, I led the creation of the Clockwork Product Design Career Path and the Performance Evaluation System, defining:
This work became the backbone of how the design team grew, developed skills, and aligned with the broader Product organization.
Designers didn’t have visibility into what skills they needed to advance or how they were being measured.
Managers evaluated designers using personal criteria, leading to misalignment, confusion, and frustration.
Titles existed, but the distinctions between Associate, Mid, Senior, and Lead were unclear and not tied to real competencies.
The team needed a model that showed:
A design team cannot scale, or retain talent, without:
This initiative brought structure, fairness, and transparency to roles that previously relied too heavily on intuition. It also professionalized the design function inside Clockwork.
I led this initiative end to end:
Creating a design career path isn’t only about defining skills.
It must:
The structure included four core levels:
Foundational execution, limited autonomy, high mentorship required.
Independent execution, handles features end-to-end, collaborates across teams.
Owns large problem spaces, leads initiatives, mentors others, influences strategy.
Shapes product direction, drives systems-level thinking, elevates the team, cross-functional leadership.
Each level was defined by these pillars:
These categories formed the basis for growth and evaluation.
I designed structured evaluation templates that included:
For example, Mid-Level evaluation included categories such as:
Clear statements like:
“Consistently delivers end-to-end product flows with minimal supervision.”
Both qualitative and quantitative.
Which standardized reviews across managers.
These templates became the central tool for:
The Career Path defined what great looked like. The evaluations defined how we measure it. Together, they created a full system for:
It professionalized the design function and created a healthy team culture.
Designers finally understood expectations, growth paths, and how promotions worked.
Managers used the same rubric and language, reducing bias and misalignment.
Clear levels meant better job descriptions and interviews.
Designers felt supported and saw a future for themselves.
The design team adopted a language of:
Shared definitions created smoother collaboration and clearer expectations.
This project taught me how critical structure is for creative teams. Design cannot scale without:
Creating the Clockwork Product Design Career Framework allowed the team to evolve from a group of individual contributors into a cohesive, empowered, and professionally supported design organization. This work is one of the clearest representations of my strengths as a systems thinker, design leader, and team builder.
