Measuring social impact design
YLabs Global's seven-person design team had been struggling to land a leveling matrix for years. Over six months, I worked with their Executive Director and Design Director to build a 16-competency, 6-level system, anchored in Radford/AON standards, that finally made performance and growth legible.
16
competencies
6
levels
1
design team transformed
YLabs Global is a youth-driven health and economic opportunity nonprofit operating across Berkeley and Kigali. Their work spans contraceptive access in Rwanda, climate resilience for adolescent girls, and economic mobility programs across East Africa. Their seven-person design team had a problem: nobody on it could clearly articulate what differentiated a junior designer from a senior one, or what it took to advance.
The team had tried to solve this internally. Multiple off-site working sessions across design, tech, and operations had produced fragments (competency lists, role descriptions, partial framework) but nothing landed. The lack of clear leveling was creating real friction: ambiguity in performance conversations, inconsistency in promotion decisions, and a quiet but persistent morale problem. The Executive Director and Design Director knew they needed outside help to finally land it.
I was brought in to design that system with them.
Building from the right starting point
We didn't start from a blank page. I anchored the framework in Radford/AON's compensation and leveling standards—the industry baseline used by most large tech and design organizations—and then translated it into language that fit YLabs' actual work: research-driven, field-based, global development, multi-stakeholder. The result was sixteen competencies mapped across six levels, designed to honor design industry norms while remaining specific to how YLabs actually operates.
The competencies covered the full arc of design practice: research, synthesis, craft, systems thinking, cross-cultural collaboration, mentorship, strategic judgment, organizational influence. Each had concrete behavioral indicators at each level, so a designer reading their level could see specifically what they did well and where they needed to grow next.
Using it
The matrix was used to complete a first round of design team assessments, and then ported into a third-party assessment tool so YLabs could run the process at scale across review cycles. The format was structured to integrate with YLabs's organization-wide criteria, so design didn't operate as a leveling island.
The conversation underneath
The matrix was the visible deliverable of a longer six-month advisory engagement that included coaching work with YLabs's Executive Director and Design Director. Some of the most important work happened in those conversations—about how to give designers feedback, how to handle promotion requests, and how to build performance culture in a mission-driven organization where the work itself can feel uncomfortable to measure.
Why it matters
Leveling matrices look like documentation. They're actually a way to make the social and political dynamics of a design team legible—to its members, to its leadership, and to itself. When designers know what's expected at each level, they stop guessing, stop grubbing, and start growing. That's design org infrastructure. It's some of the most leveraged work a senior design leader can do.
