Career Ladders

Oct 8, 2026

• Intercom

  Clear career paths for high-performing Data Science and Research teams

  Intercom created a unified RAD function 18 months ago, merging Product Research and Product Analytics to drive evidence-based decisions. To build a high-performing team, they developed career ladders with two paths: individual contributor and manager, where management is a lateral move, not a promotion. The IC track spans Associate to Senior Principal and assesses six skill sets: mastery, partnerships and influence, impact, leadership, communication, and feedback and collaboration, with specific competencies like tools and methods, product knowledge, and mentorship. The management track focuses on five skill sets: leadership, people management, business strategy, product strategy, and execution and impact, where managers are expected to be role models, uplevel the RAD function, and coach their teams. These ladders, created with managers Nick, Louis, and Hayley, clarify roles, align expectations, promote development, and enable fair performance calibration, prioritizing mastery and communication across both paths.

• Intercom

  The Importance Of A Clear Career Path For Product Managers

  Product management lacks clear deliverables such as code or designs, making performance reviews inconsistent and overly reliant on peer feedback across multiple managers. Career ladders address this by clarifying role expectations and promotion criteria, enabling fairer and more consistent reviews, though promotion remains nuanced beyond discrete tasks. Intercom’s ladder organizes PM skills into five buckets: insights driven, strategy, execution, driving outcomes, and leadership behaviors, each with two to four discrete areas totaling 17, chosen from real feedback given to team members. Expectations are defined from Associate to Principal level, with execution explicitly tied to R&D principles like starting with the problem, thinking big but starting small, and shipping to learn. The ladder deliberately separates driving outcomes from shipping to ensure PMs focus on impact without sacrificing delivery, and includes leadership behaviors such as communication, collaboration, ownership, and decisiveness.