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Ameet Palkar
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Case study · 5 min read

Making growth visible, for designers and for the leads who review them

design team review completion
60–70 → 45–50 days
no revisions before launch
Approved as written
later adopted as the shared base
Design + engineering

The problem: nobody could see what good looked like

Before the framework, appraisals were a once-a-year event. Each designer wrote a report about what they'd done over the year, and that report was most of what they were judged on. The criteria were vague and generic. Nothing told a designer what they should aim for that year, or what it would take to reach the next level.

Feedback came once a year, and then designers waited another twelve months to learn whether they'd improved. They also had to collect all of their own evidence, with no regular points where anyone checked in. Many of them told me how frustrating it was.

I felt the other side of it myself. In my first year as a design lead, I realized I didn't actually know what I was supposed to give my designers feedback on. There was no shared standard for me to assess against either.

So the system was broken for everyone: designers couldn't see where they were headed, and leads had nothing consistent to measure them by.

What I built

A single framework covering all four design disciplines (UX, UI, UX research, and visual design) from the most junior designer up to lead.

It rests on four competencies: core skills, leadership, organizational culture, and learning. Each is broken down into specific principles. Leadership, for example, covers things like mentorship and design strategy; learning covers things like knowledge sharing across teams. Every principle has a detailed description of what it looks like in practice and how a lead should score it.

The key design decision was how those competencies are weighted. Designers are grouped into stages by seniority: managing themselves, managing others, and managing managers. Each stage weights the four competencies differently.

For someone in their first design job, the score is mostly about core craft, and leadership isn't scored at all. That's deliberate. It would be unfair to judge freshers on leadership while they're still learning the work. As designers move up, leadership, community, and learning carry more and more of the weight.

That means the career path is written into the scoring itself. Any designer can look at the next stage and see exactly what growing means: moving from making good work to multiplying it through other people.

How the weighting shifts as designers growFour stacked bars, one per career stage: early career (managing self), mid-level (managing self), senior (managing others) and lead (managing managers). Each bar is split into core skills, leadership, organizational culture and learning. Core skills is the largest part for early-career designers and shrinks at every stage. Leadership is absent at the early-career stage, appears at mid-level and grows to one of the largest parts for leads. Culture and learning grow modestly. Illustrative, not actual weights.Early career(managing self)Mid-level(managing self)Senior(managing others)Lead(managing managers)Core skillsLeadershipOrganizational cultureLearningIllustrative. Not actual weights.
As designers grow, the framework shifts what they're measured on, from making great work to multiplying it through others.

How adoption happened

I spent two months building it, and most of that time went into talking to people, not writing. I interviewed the design leads about what they wanted to evaluate, HR about the culture they wanted to reinforce, and senior leadership about what mattered to the business. Because we were now part of a larger parent company, I made sure it reflected what the wider organization valued too.

Then I introduced it in a deliberate order:

  1. HR and senior leadership first. They would own the process, so they saw it before anyone else.
  2. The engineers who ran our performance system. I checked that the new structure could be built into the existing tool, so launch was a practical step, not a wish.
  3. A workshop for design leads from every centre, covering every principle, how to score it, and how to keep their records.
  4. Leads then trained their own teams. I handed it over on purpose. The framework reached each team in their own manager's voice, and the leads owned it from day one.

The organization runs reviews half-yearly. I encouraged leads to check in with their designers every quarter as well, so designers got regular feedback and each lead arrived at every review with two sets of observations already written.

It was approved and implemented without a single change to its principles. The only adjustment came from HR, who refined the score ranges on the rating scale.

What changed

  • Faster reviews. The design team now completes its reviews in 45–50 days instead of 60–70.
  • Clear targets. After two quarters, I went back to the designers who had complained about the old system. Most said they finally knew what they were working towards. Many kept a running record against the framework through the quarter, so review time meant pulling from notes rather than reconstructing a year from memory.
  • Scores people could understand. When a designer scored lower on a principle, they could see why, because it traced back to conversations they'd already had with their lead. Leads found those conversations easier to have.
  • It spread. HR later used the framework as the base for the engineering organization's own version. Today a single framework built on it covers design and development together.

What I'd do again, anywhere

  1. Write the career path into the weighting. Don't just list what good looks like; show how priorities shift as people grow.
  2. Be fair to each stage. Judge people on what their role actually asks of them, not on what the next role will ask.
  3. Build it with the people who will judge it. The launch was smooth because the hard conversations happened before a single page was written.
  4. Cascade through leads, not around them. People adopt a system faster when their own manager explains it.
  5. Design the rhythm for everyone who uses it. A half-yearly cycle suited HR's decisions; quarterly check-ins suited designers' growth. You can have both.