CASE STUDY · ORGANIZATIONAL ARCHITECTURE
They kept losing engineers.
Money wasn’t going to fix it.
A sports organization had built a serious technology function and staffed it with talented people to run it. The jobs existed. The careers didn't.
THE CHALLENGE
Roles were defined inconsistently across teams. Titles varied, skills expectations lived in individual managers' heads, and paths forward were invisible — including the lateral moves that already existed. The organization was competing for technical talent against technology companies with clear, published ladders. Against that, ambiguity read as a ceiling, and people left before finding out whether it was one.
THE APPROACH
Assess.
Inventoried existing role definitions across technology teams, and benchmarked them against established industry skills standards to establish what the gap actually was.
Design.
Built the framework — technical disciplines, roles, and seniority levels, with the skills and proficiency expected at each, plus role profiles showing progression and lateral options.
Equip.
Prepared leaders to carry it: the change strategy, manager enablement, and the conversations they'd need to have with their teams before anything was announced.
The structural decision that mattered: build it with the organization, not for it. Technology and people leaders selected and stress-tested every role, skill, and proficiency level themselves — so the framework reflected how the work actually happened, and arrived already carrying their authority.
THE IMPACT
The organization got a shared language for careers in technology: every employee could see where they stood, what came next, and which lateral moves existed that no one had named before.
Because leaders built it, it launched with their backing rather than their tolerance.
Lowest voluntary turnover on record for the technology team in the year that followed.
As reported by organizational leadership.