Leader’s Guide – How to Use the Career Path to Support Team Growth

📙 Leader’s Guide – How to Use the Career Path to Support Team Growth

🧭 Why is this tool important?

The Career Path is not just a growth framework — it’s a practical roadmap that allows you, as a leader, to have more structured, fair, and empowering conversations with your team.

Many frustrations or disengagement issues in companies stem from a lack of clarity around what is expected, how people are evaluated, and how they can grow. The Career Path solves that by providing a shared reference for personal and professional development that’s clear, accessible, and actionable.

 

How to use it in conversations

1. In your 1:1 meetings

Bringing the Career Path into your regular 1:1s helps you:

• Reinforce achievements already accomplished.

• Identify missing milestones.

• Align on expectations and next steps.
  
  

👉 Tip: Don’t treat it as a rigid checklist. Use it as a conversation starter — talk about motivations, what the person enjoys, what’s challenging, and how they see their future.

2. To co-create development plans

The Career Path helps you design individual development plans based on actual gaps and opportunities. Examples:

• If someone wants to move to Semi Sr but lacks a key technical skill, suggest a course and assign a small project to practice it.

• If someone wants to take on more responsibility, have them lead a small project component and debrief the experience together.

👉 Tip: Development is rarely linear. Be honest about what’s realistic, but encourage growth in small, tangible ways.

3. To support fair decision-making

The Career Path helps reduce bias and intuition-based decisions. When multiple team members request growth or promotion, you can rely on shared, transparent criteria to guide the conversation.

👉 Tip: Don’t overpromise. If a promotion or raise depends on budget or role availability, be clear and honest.

 

Key leadership principles when using this tool

How is the Leadership Track structured?

Just like the technical tracks, the leadership path is structured into 3 stages. Each stage includes expectations around autonomy, impact, soft skills, and leadership competencies.

 

 

🧱 How is the leadership path structured for developers?

Unlike other areas, the development team at Lowcode is organized by platform expertise — Bubble, FlutterFlow, Glide, and Webflow — and each of these stacks has its own Technical Lead.

These leads are the highest technical reference within their platform and are responsible for quality, mentorship, and decision-making within their specific stack.

To grow beyond their individual technology, and step into the Head of Development role, each Lead must develop a broader, cross-platform understanding of Lowcode’s technical ecosystem.

That’s why we created the Bridge Skills Map — a guide that outlines what each Lead needs to learn about the other stacks to become ready for a global leadership role.

This ensures that whoever steps into the Head of Development role can:

• Think strategically across platforms

• Make architecture decisions that impact the full company

• Support and mentor all technical teams

• Align development standards and practices across stacks

In short: each Tech Lead grows vertically in their stack — but must grow horizontally in knowledge to move up.

 

Not everyone wants to lead people — and that’s okay

One common misconception is that “growing” means managing a team. But many people are more fulfilled by deepening their technical expertise or becoming project leaders without direct reports.

Your role as a leader is to open up that conversation. The leadership track is an option, not a requirement.

 

🔍 Use the Leadership Potential Survey

We’ve implemented a survey designed to help identify whether someone shows aptitude and interest in leadership. It’s not definitive, but it’s a helpful data point.

👉 Pro tip: When someone expresses interest in leadership, validate it through multiple lenses — technical skills, emotional maturity, communication, ability to navigate conflict, and actual availability.

 

Create space for honest conversations

Sometimes people don’t express their ambitions because they’re unsure if it’s okay to want more. It’s your job to build a safe space where career conversations can happen openly and constructively.

👉 Questions you can ask:

• Where do you see yourself a year from now?

• Do you feel like you’re using your full potential?

• What part of your job excites you the most?

• Is there anything you’d like to learn or get better at?
  
  

Connecting Career Path to Performance Reviews

The Career Path doesn’t replace the performance review — it complements it. The review gives you a snapshot of past performance; the Career Path shows what’s possible next.

Use them together like this:

• Compare review results against the expectations of the next level.

• If someone scores well in Problem Solving but needs to improve Communication, set a short-term goal before advancing.

• If someone consistently meets or exceeds expectations and all milestones are complete, the Career Path can support a promotion recommendation.
  
  

🔁 Keeping the Career Path Alive

The Career Path is not a one-time read — it’s a tool meant to live in your day-to-day leadership practice.

As a team lead, you play a key role in keeping it active and relevant. Here’s how:

• Revisit it regularly during 1:1s, feedback sessions, and performance reviews.

• Use it as a base to define development goals, assign stretch tasks, or suggest learning paths.

• Update your knowledge of each role’s expectations and evolution — especially if you’re mentoring across teams.

• Bring it into onboarding to give new team members clarity and motivation from day one.
  
  

👉 Growth happens over time, and the Career Path helps you guide it — but only if you use it consistently.