Case 04 — Catawiki
UX competencies framework
Overview
When I joined Catawiki's design team, the competency framework wasn't working. It didn't reflect how the team had matured, wasn't useful for hiring or promotions, and created constant misalignment between managers and designers. People didn't know what good looked like at each level, and growth conversations felt arbitrary as a result.
The problems this caused were concrete: performance ambiguity, career frustration, and inefficient hiring. I led the complete redesign of the framework in early 2025, creating a unified structure covering product designers, design systems designers, and content designers, built around five core competencies and five proficiency levels.
I owned this end-to-end, from gap analysis and framework design through to stakeholder alignment and team rollout.
Role & Approach
I worked with HR partners, hiring managers, and senior individual contributors across the design team to make sure the framework worked for everyone it would affect. My process started with understanding where things weren't working: conversations with designers and managers surfaced where the existing framework was causing ambiguity or frustration. I then benchmarked against industry standards and Catawiki's engineering competency framework, which gave me both a quality bar and a structural reference point for consistency across the company.
From there I defined a core set of competencies with clear proficiency levels, created discipline-specific descriptions where the expectations for designers and writers genuinely diverged, and aligned the whole thing with HR's company-wide competency structure. I validated with individual contributors and managers before finalizing, then rolled it out with team presentations.
Key Decisions
1. Proficiency levels, not checklists.
The shift was from "what you do" to "how well you do it." Each level describes a degree of mastery, not a checklist, giving people a clear target and growth conversations something concrete to point to.
Competencies
The combination of skills, abilities, and behaviours needed to perform in a role.
Proficiency levels
The degree of mastery expected in a specific level, for a given competency.
2. Simplicity over comprehensiveness.
Each competency could have had ten subcategories, but that would have killed the usefulness. I landed on five: Design Vision, Business Acumen, Craft Execution, Stakeholder Management, and Leadership, clarity over covering every edge case. Some of these aren't unique to design either: Business Acumen is also expected of product managers and engineers, just expressed differently. Same competency, same structure, different content depending on the discipline.
Stakeholder Management Company-wide definition
The ability to effectively engage and manage relationships with internal and external stakeholders to build sustainable networks and drive (profitable, sustainable) growth. It includes understanding stakeholder needs, managing expectations and collaborating with stakeholders in complex environments to align processes and reporting.
Stakeholder Management UX-specific definition
The ability to effectively engage, align, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive UX success.
In order to effectively manage stakeholders, you:
- Clearly articulate design rationale to help non-designers understand UX decisions.
- Facilitate alignment across teams, ensuring UX is integrated early in the product development process.
- Lead discussions that balance the needs of design, product, engineering, and business teams.
- Adapt communication style based on the audience (e.g., product managers, engineers, leadership).
- Foster a collaborative UX culture, ensuring open feedback and knowledge sharing.
3. Shared structure, tailored details.
Writers and designers needed different content, not different structures. Same five competencies, same proficiency model for both, respecting that craft execution looks different for a writer than a designer.
Craft Execution For product designers
The ability to create high-quality, scalable, and user-centred designs that enhance usability, accessibility, and efficiency.
In order to execute UX at a high level, you:
- Apply best practices in interaction design, content design, and information architecture.
- Ensure consistency and reusability by contributing to and evolving design systems.
- Incorporate accessibility and usability standards to create inclusive experiences.
- Rapidly prototype and test concepts to iterate on solutions based on feedback.
- Use structured methods (heuristics, design patterns) to ensure logical, user-friendly experiences.
Craft Execution For content designers
The ability to create clear, concise, and effective UX content that improves usability, accessibility, and the overall user experience.
In order to execute UX writing at a high level, you:
- Write clear, concise, and user-friendly interface copy, error messages, tooltips, and onboarding flows.
- Ensure content is localized and scalable, making it easy to adapt for different markets.
- Apply content accessibility best practices, ensuring inclusivity for all users.
- Iterate and refine content based on user feedback, research, and A/B testing.
- Maintain and contribute to content style guides, frameworks, and documentation.
4. Special treatment for design systems designers.
Rather than a separate track, I added targeted notes under each competency for how expectations shift for that role, simple, without ignoring their different scope. Two examples:
Design Vision For design systems designers
Your vision focuses on creating a scalable, consistent, and efficient design system that aligns with the company's UX strategy.
Stakeholder Management For design systems designers
Stakeholder management involves working closely with designers, engineers, and product teams to ensure design system adoption, alignment, and continuous improvement.
Outcome & Impact
Results
- Complete framework: A comprehensive competency framework featuring five competencies and five proficiency levels.
- Role alignment: Separate but aligned versions for product designers and content designers, with targeted notes for design systems designers.
- Progression mapping: Clear proficiency expectations established for every role level, spanning from associate all the way through to senior principal.
- Operational integration: Integrated into hiring, with each interview round mapped to one or more competencies, and into performance reviews.
| Competency | Associate UX Designer | UX Designer | Senior UX Designer | Lead UX Designer | Principal UX Designer | Senior Principal UX Designer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design Vision | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 5 |
| Business Acumen | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 5 |
| Craft Execution | 2 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Stakeholder Management | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Design Leadership | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Leadership impact
- Shared language: Created a shared language for growth and expectations across the UX organisation, replacing arbitrary conversations with a clear, consistent structure.
- Coaching roadmap: Provided managers with concrete language for coaching while giving designers a real roadmap for progression.
- Decision-making baseline: Established a reliable framework actively used for hiring, performance reviews, and promotion decisions.
Reflection
The hardest part of this project was resisting the urge to make it comprehensive. Every time I added a nuance, I was making it less useful. The discipline of simplicity, choosing clarity over coverage, is something I'd apply more consciously from the start on any future framework work.