nerdleader

What is it we want our job titles to communicate? We use them to describe what we are currently doing for work so that we may have better conversations, scoped with the appropriate verbiage, candor, etc. Indeed, a person’s job title also allows us the opportunity to investigate appropriate relationships to build or is a good prompt for asking questions about what one does or how they do it.

Last week we reflected on building and standardizing job titles for the individual contributor. We identified that experience and specific technical role are excellent components for a job title, leading us to develop titles with the follow pattern:

<grade> <aspect> <role>

This pattern gives us titles such as “Senior Software Engineer” or “Distinguished Data Scientist”. These titles feel familiar, with few enough problems with standardization – meaning a Senior Software Engineer at one organization would have a familiar role at a different organization. Excellent.

Manager titles, however, are a little trickier to conform due to the vast differences in organizational makeup and size in our industry. We will look at two different hierarchies loosely based on organization size, but with the following strategic premise:

• Manager – “how” things will be accomplished
• Director – “who” will be accomplishing things
• Vice President – “what” will be accomplished
• C-level – “why” the team is doing what they are doing

The list below is predicated on scale of people leadership, and not from the very germane perspectives of matrix organizations or manager scope of responsibility. We will look at a top-down approach of titling at the end of this section which better accounts for responsibility and purview.

Manager titles can be built like so:

<level>, <team>

Easy, yes? Occasionally there may be context-specific changes such as having “ of “ replace a comma to create a title such as “Director of Technology” instead of “Director, Technology”, but that is up to the creator.

Level

Flatter or Smaller Organizations

• Manager – 1-8 team members
• Director – 9-30 team members
• Vice President – 31 – 120 team members

Larger Org

• Manager – 1-8 team members
• Senior Manager – 9-30 team members
• Director – 31-120 team members
• Senior Director – 120 team members – 500 team members
• Vice President – 501 – 2000 team members
• Senior Vice President – 2001 – 8000+ team members
• C-level – 6000 – 25000+ team members

Largest Organizations

I do not have much experience with the largest organizations. In my experience, how the largest organizations handle large scale is custom for each organization. Usually they scale decision-making not by having additional tiers of management, but by giving managers additional direct reports, creating matrix organizations, or by having separate presidents / C-level individuals leading large pieces of the organization, and those presidents reporting to the group / global executive leadership team.

As you can see, we build off the original 4 titles from our premise, and then for the larger org we incorporate “Senior” roles for each title to create additional room for hierarchy. The idea is predicated on the “two pizza” team theory, and allowing for a manager at any given level to have an average of four directs with their own teams, and 4 Individual Contributor directs to participate in architecture, administration, etc.

For organizations that find themselves within the “smaller” and “larger” organizations and needing a bit more hierarchy, start adding Senior roles from the bottom up. This rewards talent while avoiding having a “top heavy” organization. In other words, scale decision-making upwards as you grow.

Executive Director, Associate Vice President, etc.

Finance organizations, international organizations, etc., all find themselves with different titling philosophies. Many organizations have a Managing Director controlling a P&L or the entire organization – also common within domestic consulting organizations – with various Associate Director, Executive Director, Senior Director, etc., titles. While I am not advocating “throw that out”, it is not an approach I am advocating FOR either. I believe consistency and differentiation are key to appropriate manager titles, and it does not behoove us to call everybody a “Director” or “Vice President”.

Team

Related to technology aspect as discussed last week, “team” represents the collection of competencies that a manager is using to advance the organization’s mission. Often there is a 1:1 correlation between aspect and team – Product, Quality, etc. As the team gets larger, however, a manager will find themselves over more and more aspects of the technology mission, and the titles will need to represent the larger scope and become slightly more generic.

Caveat – larger organizations have a tremendous number of teams, and it can be helpful to have additional specificity in team designation. It may not be helpful to have 200 “Directors of Engineering”, so there may be some additional type of differentiation brought to bear. Again, the larger the organization, the more customized the organization itself becomes.

• Product – externally facing, responsible for the health and usage of the platform. Modern combination of marketing and technology
• Technology – catch-all for modern creation and operations
• Quality – eliminating bugs, enhancing security and performance
• Engineering / Development – creation of digital assets
• Analytics – utilizing data to deliver insights and make predictions
• Infrastructure – traditional operations covering networking, servers, storage, etc.
• Cloud – modern operations using software-based rented infrastructure
• Architecture – the design and implementation of software-based business processes and products
• Security – detecting and eliminating threats to the business environment

Of note – as one progresses up the corporate ladder, some of the team names change and/or disappear. Some of the top technology roles at an organization might be Chief DIGITAL Officer or Chief INFORMATION Officer, but we rarely see a Director of Digital or VP of Information. If a team requires a Manager, it is likely that they will end up needing a Director as well, and the consolidation of teams appears to happen most frequently around the Vice President level. It is common for there to be Software Development Managers and Directors of Application Development who report to a Vice President of Product, for example.

But why? What are we accomplishing?

By having manager titles that are more standardized we allow for expectations around competency and scope to be set immediately, before conversations begin or tasks are assigned. But more than that, when it comes time to cross-train, seek new positions, seek replacements, etc., we have a solid, dependable gap created between current knowledge and required knowledge.

For example, what does a “Director of SAP Systems” actually do? Customizations? Infrastructure? All of the above? What is the likelihood that it changes from organization to organization? What other ERP systems are they familiar with? But a “Director of Infrastructure” applying for an ERP role would allow reviewers to understand that the technologist is coming from a place of support and delivery, and the resume would answer additional questions. It narrows down the gap between previous knowledge/ responsibility and required. Putting it all together, both individual contributor titles and manager titles are wildly varied and amorphic. We seek out title promotions and are therefore given them in lieu of pay increases, so we have title inflation. We do things differently depending on the type of organization. We hide biases within them. We argue and we preen, and we can stop the madness by instituting rules to conform titles and set expectations. By simplifying, we create certainty around current roles and responsibilities, while also allowing for consistent gaps between title and next role/position.