Most engineers want to keep growing. Many of them don't know how, and in a small startup, nobody has written it down for them.
That's a real problem. Without a visible path, good engineers stall, or leave for a company that has one. But the usual fix, copying a big tech company's career framework, tends to make things worse.
Here's how I approached it as a CTO, and what I learned.
The problem with "just add a career ladder"
A few things are true at once in an early-stage startup:
- Engineers need a growth path. Without one, the only visible way up is "become a manager," and not everyone is meant to manage people.
- Under about 30 employees, a formal ladder is usually premature. The team is too small for levels, rubrics and calibration committees to mean much.
- Big-company frameworks don't transfer. They're built for hundreds of engineers, and in a small team they mostly add process overhead.
So you need something lighter than a formal framework, but more deliberate than "we'll figure it out at review time."
Start with one question: which track?
I borrowed heavily from Buffer's career framework, especially its split between two tracks.
The first career conversation has one goal: find out which direction the person wants to grow. Do they want to become a manager, or go deeper as an individual contributor?
It's hard to do both well at the same time. Part of your job is helping each person pick the track that actually fits what they want, not the one they think they're supposed to want.
The IC track: find the gap, then train for it
For individual contributors, the approach is straightforward:
- Identify the skills the person is missing for the next step.
- Line up the right training: courses, stretch projects, pairing.
- Track their progress along that path.
Where it makes sense, tie salary or bonus expectations to that growth curve, so there's a real incentive to keep progressing. And keep those expectations anchored to business value. Growth that doesn't help the team or the company is a hobby, not a career step.
The management track: lead yourself first
The management track is harder in a startup, simply because there are fewer people to manage. But progress is still possible, and it starts before anyone reports to you.
To lead others, you first have to lead yourself. So before handing an engineer direct reports, give them other kinds of management to master:
- Function management: owning an area of the system end to end
- Task and project management: planning, sequencing and delivering work
- Client management: handling stakeholders and their expectations
Only after that do you add people management. By then they've practiced most of the skills it needs.
Both tracks: inventory the soft skills
For either track, it's worth keeping a simple list of soft skills and training resources, so each person's growth has some structure.
In my experience, two skills matter most, and they're the two the general engineering population is most often missing: clear communication and empathy-driven leadership. They have the biggest effect on how well a team works together and how much it gets done.
What I learned
- Every person needs an individual approach. A framework is a starting point, not a script.
- It takes time to understand how someone works before you can sensibly assign them growth goals.
- Training has to balance two things: what the engineer wants to learn and what the team and business need.
- Not everyone can be trained into a role. When training doesn't work, or it becomes clear someone isn't a fit for the position, be prepared to let them go.
That last one is the hardest, and it's part of the job too. A career ladder is a promise that growth is possible. Keeping that promise honest sometimes means admitting a particular seat isn't the right one.
I'm Vladimir Baranov, an executive coach for tech and science executives and founders, and previously co-founder and CTO of AdvisorEngine. A shorter version of this post first appeared on Human Interfaces.
