Standards, Levels & Paths
Early in my career, before I even got into product, I had a performance review with the head of our department. I was young and learning the job. He told me I was given the top rating, shared my raise, and said: "You're doing great, keep up the good work." I walked out of that review proud.
And also frustrated.
The rating felt good. But I was thirsty for direction and didn't get any. I knew I was still learning and not up for promotion. And yet I had no idea what I was supposed to do differently, what the next level looked like, or what it would take to get there. The conversation told me where I stood. It said nothing about where I was going.
I craved feedback, but I didn’t get it.
Bill Walsh was a Hall of Fame coach who transformed the San Francisco 49ers from the worst franchise in the NFL to a dynasty. He built his leadership philosophy around what he called a Standard of Performance. His premise was simple: define what great looks like first. The results follow.
“Champions behave like champions before they’re champions; they have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.”
One of the first things Walsh did as a coach was define the standard for how his team would operate. He was very clear about what he expected regarding behavior, preparation, execution, and attitude — and oriented everything toward it. Winning, he believed, would take care of itself if the team worked consistently towards these standards.
Many product and engineering leaders do a version of this for their products. They define success metrics. They set OKRs. They establish principles for the customer experience or the business outcome. They measure against it and improve.
Fewer do it for their teams. They are the ones doing the work and striving toward the product goals.
Standards
A team standard is a clear and visible definition of what great looks like for the people on your team. It’s real and meaningful – not an easily satired values poster nor a vague aspiration. It’s a concrete picture of excellent performance that people can orient toward and you can measure your team against.
This is a foundation for strong team performance. Research on goal setting consistently shows that specific, challenging goals drive significantly higher performance than vague ones. In one review of studies, participants with challenging, specific goals outperformed those with easy or nonspecific goals by more than 250%.
Game designers have understood this intuitively. Players are more engaged when goals are clear, progress is visible, and effort is rewarded. The same dynamics that keep someone moving through levels in a game apply to the people on your team.
"Do better” is not a standard. It's an abdication.
The standard can be most valuable when it’s slightly aspirational. For a new leader on a team, this sets the direction of where you want the team to be, not just where it is today. You define it, orient the team toward it, and when they get there, aim higher. That's how a high-performance culture compounds over time. It is analogous to setting a vision for your team.
A good standard connects to what the business is trying to achieve. Your product KPIs measure whether the product is getting better. Your team standard should measure whether the people building it are exhibiting behaviors that will consistently lead to a better product team – and product.
Levels
A standard tells people what great looks like. But great looks different depending on roles.
A first-year PM and a lead PM could have equal potential, but they will be in different stages of their journey. While they might be evaluated by the same criteria, you would not expect them to be equal. If you expected exactly the same from them, you would set one up to fail and the other to underperform.
Levels put the standard in context of where someone is. They define degrees of mastery, contribution, and scope relative to their true peers. They answer the question my old manager couldn't: not just "how am I doing" but "what should I focus on in order to progress?"
This is what a career ladder makes explicit. Done well it's a valuable leadership tool, which establishes what great looks like across your team, by role and by level.
Paths
Standards and levels together create a visible path forward. If people see a path for growth, they stay. If that path doesn’t exist, they look for one elsewhere.
When people can see where they are vs. where they want to go, it’s easier to define specific improvements. It’s clearer what the employee should focus on, and also how their manager can best support them. That's motivating in a way that "you're doing great, keep up the good work" never is.
Ideally there can be multiple paths forward. For example, within a job family I recommend one for individual contributors and one for people managers. Some teams make management the only path to advancement, which pushes strong individual contributors into roles they don't want and aren't suited for. It also limits progress on a team that doesn’t need another manager. That's a loss for everyone.
The path also gives leaders something they often lack: a basis for honest, forward-looking conversations. When the standard is clear and the levels are defined, a career conversation can be much more specific, tangible, and connected to the employee’s goals. Where do you want to go? What's the gap to getting there? What are you working on to close it? What support would help accelerate progress?
That's the conversation I wanted as a 22-year-old with my first top rating. I didn't need more praise. I needed a direction.
Bottom Line
Building the artifact that makes standards, levels, and paths real for your team is the subject of my next post. It covers how to define your team’s competencies, how to structure levels, and complementary processes to make the whole system work.
If this resonated and you want a thought partner to work through it, or discuss how to build a higher-performing team overall, I'd be glad to talk. Book time.
