SurveyMonkey Job Architecture Initiative

Overview

Career documentation at SurveyMonkey was difficult to navigate and understand. So the Research & Design organization launched an initiative to improve it for our part of the company. I documented our work, communicated progress, led activities to gather user input, and drove timely delivery. Stakeholders told us the resulting improvements made the documentation so much easier to use.

Process

1. We needed a record of our work. So I proposed some guiding principles and aligned the team around them. At the end of the project, we had a slide deck telling the complete story of the process.

2. The team needed to know how well our uses understood job competencies. I paired up with a product designer to create an activity for stakeholders. We asked them to write examples of each competency at each level of the job hierarchy. As a result, we could see where the expectations of individual contributors didn't match up with those of managers.

3. Most members of the job architecture team were quite busy with product work. They had trouble delivering on time. So I sent Slack reminders, suggested changes in responsibilities where needed, designed discovery-related activities, and synthesized the findings. That ensured we got each step of the process done by the deadline.

4. One of the last things we wanted to know was how stakeholders wanted to see career documentation. The company had a big, in-person event coming up where we could do a workshop. I proposed a simple exercise where we had people draw or diagram (on paper) what they were looking for. It was easy to execute, and we walked away with a blueprint for documentation.

5. We needed to translate our research into a concept. I produced one as an example, which inspired other team members to do the same. In the end, we combined ideas from each of them into something intuitive our users loved.

Artifacts