Who Killed the Career Ladder

Traditionally, careers are often imagined as a ladder. The rungs of the ladder are represented by higher level job titles and “climbing the ladder” provides individuals with sequentially higher levels of responsibility, status & compensation as they stay within an organisation and continue to add value. The ladder for product may look something like the below:

The trouble is, the career ladder is outdated in most professions, including product. It rarely represents the reality of most product people’s career experiences and sticking to this outdated narrative risks disengaging some of our most talented team members. As André Spicer of the Guardian says, “careers have been replaced with jobs, and jobs have been increasingly replaced with tasks.” But what happened to the career ladder and what does that mean for how we create compelling careers for our product teams?

The Slow Death Of The Career Ladder

The career ladder has been dying in most organisations and professions for a long time now. The major death knell has been the flattening of organisational structures. Whether for cost-cutting purposes, the removal of bureaucracy or to lean into agile and ‘distributed authority’, organisations are flatter today on average than they were a few decades ago. This has had a few impacts:

1. Fewer rungs: Whole rungs of the ladder have been removed to flatten structures, particularly in management. The rungs of the ladder that remain have become gradually narrower with less and less opportunity for individuals to climb. This has meant many product professionals wishing to progress either have to wait a long time for an opportunity or seek it outside of their current organisation.
2. Broken rungs in the ladder: Fewer progression opportunities has led to a generally harder jump for product people from individual contributors to management positions. This bigger jump as well as fewer overall positions has increased the tendency for organisations to prefer external hires with management experience over progressing their people internally. This is a break in the ladder for those organisations – even if the positions exit, the likelihood of someone progressing internally is severely hampered.
3. Less clear, more matrixed decisions: With less hierarchical management and greater numbers of direct reports for each manager, decision making has increased in complexity. Not only are managers more likely to be overwhelmed by their remit, they are less likely to have expertise in all the areas they cover. This result is an overall increase in the number of people involved in decisions compared to more hierarchical structures. While not necessarily detrimental, it does require higher level negotiation and influencing skills in product as more people are involved in decisions.

If this wasn’t enough, this flattening of organisations has coincided with some big changes in job and skills demand, destabilising how organisations and individuals plan long term for talent and careers. Broadly, these include large scale changes to:

1. Job types: With the rise of technology over the last few decades, some jobs have been entirely removed while others have been significantly altered or added. Organisations have had to plan ahead for “jobs of the future” and some individuals have been left in “non-growth” jobs and faced with having to change careers, not climb a ladder. For product this has largely been a growth story, with more organisations implementing product management in some form and many people transitioning from other declining careers into product management.
2. Skills demand: Even within growth careers like product management, significant changes in skills have been required. As technology has evolved, so have the expectations of product managers. Up until 3 years ago it would have been uncommon to see for instance “AI product manager”, or 3 years before that “growth product manager” but now it is a relatively common expectation that product managers have these kinds of skillsets and knowledge.
3. Intergenerational work expectations: The expectations of work and its role in people’s lives has changed from generation to generation, but significant changes have been noticed in millennials and gen-Z in particular. Some of the most commonly cited examples are overall shorter tenures, greater focus on work-life balance and wellbeing in the workplace. These have not been driven entirely by individuals, but also reflect broader uncertainties faced by these generations in their working lives.

All of these trends are not unique to product teams, but in a technology focused profession, they have been significant. They are also not unique in history, similar changes occurred during the industrial revolution. But what has been unique has been the speed and scale of change. Unusually if these types of changes occur over a long period, organisations can iterate their career ladders, adapting roles, developing skills and changing benefits to continue to make it relevant. But this has largely not been the case, and one particular event expedited the death of the career ladder more than any other – COVID

And Along Came COVID

Disruption caused by the COVID pandemic turbo charged the changes that were already impacting the relevance of the career ladder. It forced rapid cost cutting in many organisations – either during or after the pandemic – that stripped out jobs and rungs in the ladder faster than ever. It forced many people onto the job market that may not have expected to leave their organisations, freeing up talent and changing their outlook for long term job stability.

It also changed the expectations of what careers and work mean for many people. Either because of redundancy or the move to remote work, more people than ever prefer flexibility in their work even more than the status of moving up the ladder. They are also more likely to leave their organisations to get what they want (whether that be a promotion or work flexibility) as reflected in the overall decline of job tenure (ABS).

Finally, COVID forced many organisations to develop new products and digital channels almost overnight causing an explosion in digital technology skills demand. The outcome for the product profession was a rapid expansion in positions – and then the subsequent layoffs in many organisations as they ‘rightsize’ after these investments in a tougher market. During the pandemic this caused an expansion of the job type in the market, beyond the skills that were available. This allowed for many to enter the profession for the first time and exacerbated the tendency of organisations to look externally for skills rather than develop them internally (as they did not have the experience or time).

All these changes occurred in a matter of 1-2 years at the height of the pandemic and put the final nails in the coffin for the traditional career ladder in most organisations. Even if a traditional career ladder exists, it is likely only on paper. It is also unrealistic to assume that the most aspirational product talent will stay long enough to climb this fictional ladder.

What This Means For Your Teams Aspirations

The trouble is, many product people within organisations still expect ‘traditional’ career ladder progression within an organisation. They expect ‘time in seat’ means that they will progress every few years and that organisations will continue to add rungs to the ladder. But as explained above, this is not the reality in most organisations. Failing to address this miss-match in expectations not only causes career dissatisfaction but also fails to set team members up for a less certain future in the product profession.

This dissatisfaction inevitably leads to disengagement. Disengagement can cost teams many times the cost of the employee’s salary in lost opportunity and lost discretionary effort. It also has a tendency to spread across teams. As product managers interact with many team members and are often expected to play a role in setting direction and maintaining team morale in challenging environments the potential risk is even worse for a disengaged product manager.

To avoid disengagement it is essential to change the narrative of what it means to succeed and break the tight tie to the defunct career ladder. This means being candid about the likely realities of title progression into the future, namely:

1. Do first, progress second: Stretching beyond the current job description to secure & exhibit relevant higher level experience will become an even stronger prerequisite for vertical movement in organisations to remain competitive with exterhires.
2. Security will come from skill diversity not title: A diverse portfolio of transferable skills & experience will be essential for long term job security in an environment where job types are constantly being disrupted & redefined.

Fewer straight shots, more detours: In order to secure the right future skills & experiences, detours will be necessary. This may mean lateral movements, steps back or even career changes to secure the necessary skills to reach an aspiration. Instead of a ladder, careers become more like a road trip with many detours along the way.

These realities of careers in the future will necessitate a change to the narrative to reflect the death of the traditional title-based career ladder in favour of careers based on growth in experience & skills. We call these ‘growth pathways’.

Shifting the narrative from ‘career ladders’ to ‘growth pathways’

Despite all of the above trends and the significant changes that have happened in careers since the COVID pandemic, the vast majority of product career pathways are still viewed as a ladder. This is doing no one any favors. It means that product leaders face a more disengaged team that is dissatisfied with their career prospects, and that team members fail to take actions that ensure their long term job security and career engagement.

To change the narrative and implement more growth-focused pathways, product leaders must focus on building structures to support a few key elements including:

1. Identification & development of transferable skills & experience that will serve teams no matter their future aspirations
2. Role modelling and building self awareness in their teams
3. Greater recognition of growth & discretionary effort, not just performance
4. Structures to avoid talent hoarding & make growth opportunities more visible
5. Identification & promotion of non-traditional pathways for career progression*

By shifting the narrative from the career ladder to a growth pathway, we can design more realistic and engaging careers in product. With structures and processes to focus on growth over strict title progression, we can better encourage team members to actively engage in their own career development and ensure they are building the skills and experience they need for a more uncertain future, rather than waiting to climb an unrealistic and outdated ladder.

*To further explore these elements for building growth pathways, join us for Part 2 of this series – Tips for designing growth pathways for product careers.