The design ladder measures craft, and it was written in the years before craft got cheap. Six of its thirteen rows now score work that costs almost nothing to do, and there is no row anywhere in it for the thing that became scarce.
Both design ladders, in fact. At Grammarly I ran product design and brand and marketing design as one organization, and each had its own ladder. Put side by side they share a spine exactly: four competency groups, thirteen rows, the same wording in most cells, differing only in which craft skills are listed at the bottom. That is not two ladders. It is one lane with two specializations, and every transfer between them became an argument about whether a BMD4 was a PD4, when the two documents said the same thing in different fonts.
Thirteen rows. Six of them are now measuring something that costs almost nothing to do.
Before the rows, the inheritance, because almost every design ladder in the industry has the same parent.
Where it came from
2016 — Merholz and Skinner
One track, five levels, and management titles appearing inside it rather than beside it. Every ladder below inherits this shape.
Design Manager sits at L3 and Design Director, Creative Director and VP of Design all sit at L5, so two levels carry both an individual and a management meaning at once.
2021 — what we actually ran
Five ladders, three shapes. The two design lanes are identical twins and research is a third, mirroring them level for level; product management is a cousin at the same height; engineering is a stranger, with its management track folded into the same line. Every one of them runs to VP.
Product management already scored UI/UX expertise. Product design already scored front-end development and product thinking. Neither ladder mentions the other. Research is a copy of design with the craft list swapped, which was the sensible thing to do at the time and is the thing the fourth essay in this series argues about.
The published ones
Design has one book everybody inherited from and a scatter of company documents published since. They agree on the axes and disagree about almost everything else.
The fork worth knowing is Merholz’s own, and I should say that he taught me most of this in the first place. He has since argued for a trellis rather than a ladder — a structure that admits people move sideways as often as up. That is the right instinct, and it is the one this series builds on. Merholz keeps an org-wide leveling framework underneath his trellis, which is the part people quoting him tend to drop, and it is the part that matters: a sideways move only has an exchange rate if there is one spine for both sides to be read against.
The six rows that stopped working
Six of the thirteen rows. They apply to all five, because all five inherited them from the same place, but design is where they do the most damage, because design is where the output they measure fell furthest in price.
The meetings row. Attends meetings, then contributes regularly, then drives meetings, then is the person the meeting exists for. This came from 2016 and I copied it without asking what it measures. It measures attendance. The room at Lyft that taught me judgment density had twenty people in it and every one of them would have scored at the top of this row. Not one of them was positioned to end the argument.
The autonomy row. Executes with specific guidance from their manager, rising to leads independently. Distance from your manager as a proxy for trust. That had six meaningful levels when teams were large. On a team of seven senior people it has about three and the rest is padding.
The process row. Understands the standard process, improves it, defines it, shifts to program. Coordination is exactly the cost that collapsed. A level defined by owning how a team coordinates is a level defined by the cheapest part of the job.
The technical expertise row. Strong in one, capable in two, rising to expert in two. The T-shape, drawn across a list of named skills. It assumed those skills sat inside disciplines with edges.
Recruiting, marked optional at every level. Defensible when a portfolio told you something. At Honor the first design team was hired largely on portfolio and a conversation, and it worked, because in 2014 a portfolio was expensive to fake. Now a portfolio can be generated in an afternoon and a take-home mostly measures who had two free weeks. Judgment about people has become one of the scarcer things a senior person owns, and it is sitting in the document with an asterisk beside it.
And one absence. Nowhere does any of the five ask what a person believes should exist. Communication covers whether they can explain a decision. Problem solving covers whether they can frame one. Nothing asks what they would put their name to and be wrong about in public.
What held
The ownership group, which sorts a person into informed, involved and invested, appears in four of the five in almost identical words and has aged better than anything else in any of them. It measures disposition rather than output, and disposition did not get cheaper. It carries over untouched.
So does the promotion criterion: a strong track record at your level, plus impact already visible at the next one. Not potential, not tenure, not a good quarter.
The skills, re-cut
Between them the five ladders name about two dozen skills. Sorted by what five years did to them:
Graphic design. Visual design. Animation. Prototyping. Illustration. Document production. Still visible when done badly; being expert in them no longer levels anybody up.
Front-end development. Product thinking. Information architecture. Basic analytics. The UI and UX literacy the product ladder used to footnote as a bonus. Assumed from the second level, in every lane. Absence is a problem; presence is not a credit.
Writing. Interaction design. Service design. Concepting and art direction. Quantitative research and experiment design. Systems architecture. The proficiency scale itself is fine and stays; what changes is that expert in two only means something when the two are drawn from this band.
This is why craft belongs in a ladder as a gate rather than as a ramp. A person can be expert in three scarce skills and sit correctly at level 2, because they decide nothing beyond their own work.
There is a name now for what the scarce band is turning into. Boris Cherny’s five archetypes for a team working with coding agents — prototyper, builder, sweeper, grower, maintainer — and the outward-facing five The AI Daily Brief added to them in July, describe a shop where making is abundant and the scarce act is choosing. The archetype that gains decision rights when prototypes are cheap is the editor: the person who says which of forty plausible things deserves to be built. That is not a new job in design. It is what the top of this table has always described, and it is the reason a ladder that still levels on the ability to produce the forty is measuring the wrong end of the process.
The six axes, in design’s language
What replaces the thirteen rows. Three of the six levels; each cell is a decision rather than an artifact, which is what lets one spine serve four functions.
The D4 column is where the old ladder had nothing to say. Every cell in it describes a refusal, and a document that levels on scope cannot score one. Notice also what is absent from the table: not one cell names a tool, a deliverable or a screen.
The failure mode to watch
Every axis here can be gamed by privilege, and some more easily than the ones they replace. Range across lanes requires having been given work in more than one, which is a fact about who was handing out assignments. Opinions held rewards whoever was safe enough to be wrong in public and stay employed. I have written about that mechanism elsewhere. The fix is not a better axis, it is a named check in the calibration room: say it out loud while the decisions are being made, rather than finding it a year later in the promotion numbers. Section 11 of the workbook is where that check lives.
The other caution is about scope. A ladder serves ranking. Development and money are two different jobs, and running all three through one document ruins all three. Whatever you do with this, keep it doing the one thing.
The whole system
You can read the argument for free. Running it is the hard part.
An essay can tell you the six rows stopped working. It cannot sit in the room in November when two managers disagree about the same person and neither can say why. That is what the workbook is for: one shared core across Engineering, Product, Research and Design (EP(R)D), six levels defined by what a person decides, and the mechanics to grade against them without the cycle turning into a negotiation.
Six levels defined once, by what a person decides alone. The shaded band is the overlap, where most of the work now belongs to no single lane. The marks to the left of each cell are doors: a move sideways at the same level, which is a transfer and not a demotion.
Written to be opened during a cycle rather than read once: on the page, as a PDF set to print, and with the templates as a spreadsheet.
Define it
Grade against it
Run the cycle
Or read section two, free.
v1. The cycle, the calibration room and the evidence standard are the ones I have run at companies of 25, 250 and 2500 people; the six axes are new. One payment, every revision by email.
One of four, each taking a function through the same framework; the system they share is set out in full in the workbook. The others are on engineering, product and research. Written from having inherited, run and rebuilt leveling and review cycles at three companies of very different sizes, and against the public frameworks that preceded them: the levels framework in Org Design for Design Orgs by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner, Rent the Runway’s engineering ladder, and Ravi Mehta’s product competency toolkit. Figures from the AI in Design Report 2026 and Figma’s State of the Designer 2026.
© 2026 Renato Valdés-Olmos