Growth Advisor is a tool I created out of necessity and desperation.

I vividly remember being a young professional, wanting to master my craft and grow my career. I wanted to good answers to the questions I had:

• What do I need to learn and master to progress?
• What is expected of me in my current role and level?
• Where do I stand relative to those expectations?
• What is expected at higher levels?
• Am I ready/do I deserve a promotion?

These are fairly simple questions, yet the answers I always got were rarely satifying, even at a world-class organization like Google. I wanted more clarity than what I was getting. I wanted the feedback and guidance I was getting to be actionable.

Fast foward a few years and I was in the manager role. Not surprisingly, I found that my reports had much the same ambitions and questions that I had when I was in their seat.

Yet, there seemed to be a dearth of good tools to help managers and their reports effectively answer these common questions. A well written compentency matrix can help a lot, but they are not user friendly. They're often articulated in some pdf or intranet page than nobody can remember how to get to. If you can find them, they don't answer the where do I stand question - that is frequently left to flowery prose in performance reviews which are disconnected from the competency matrix.

Since I could not find any good tools to answer these questions and manage the performance feedback process, I started thinking about building my own tool. I set out some things I wanted the tool to enable:

• Help HR & managers write a great compentency matrix, covering all the levels for each role
• Help HR & managers express the typical ranges for time in industry and time in level associated with each level of the role so that managers and reports are clear about the parameters
• Tightly integrate the competency matrix into the performance review and goal setting processes
• Design an inteface that makes it clear to the employeee where they stand relative to the expectations enumerated in every column of the competency matrix, and how they have progressed over time
• Design the tool such that structure brings clarity and efficiency for both manager and report

I started building Growth Avisor while I was CTO at Prezi in 2019. I knew better than to expect miracles from the first version, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much clarity and alignment it brought to the performance review process. What was previously a painful and often controversial process became a source of clarity and alignment. I was able to give my reports clear, actionable feedback that they could use to grow their careers. They were able to see where they stood relative to the expectations and what they needed to do to progress. They were able to see how they had progressed over time.

Since that time I, along with my management teams, have continued to iterate both on the tool and the competency matrices. I have been very happy with the results and the feedback from the teams using it.