‘Lean, transparent, flexible’: How Urban Sports Club cut ties with spreadsheets and found clarity with Progression

Urban Sports Club is Europe’s leading sports and fitness platform, providing access to over 10,000 venues in five countries, and more than 50 types of sport. With everything accessible via an app, Urban Sports Club’s mission is to inspire everyone to live an active, healthy lifestyle.

The challenge

When Artur Yatsenko first joined Urban Sport’s Club as Head of Product & Marketing Analytics back in February 2022, he was surprised to learn there was no standardised performance review process in place. That’s not to say career development was overlooked entirely — departments would evaluate their teams’ performance, but the process wasn’t standardised or aligned.

There were various guidelines for role levels stored in Google Slides, and frameworks in spreadsheets which simply complicated things further.

‘Having career frameworks spread among various documents posed a challenge of highlighting the common values or behaviours we agree a Senior Data, Design, Product or Engineering professional should possess.’ — Artur

Artur quickly realised something needed to change, and embarked on his own project to build a new framework for the Analytics team, again in Google Sheets. Now, Google Sheets is great for some things — requesting comments for example — but not so great for others. Artur needed a solution that brought career paths to life and went beyond the static spreadsheet.

And that’s when a leadership peer, who had adopted Progression in another company,  introduced him to the platform.

The solution

Progression helped Urban Sports Club build their first proof of concept career frameworks (for engineering and product analytics teams) easily, adapting skills from our extensive library to meet their requirements and using them as inspiration for new ones.

‘Having core values or criteria for multiple job families for our department and various teams in one place was essential.’ — Artur

Every job family is different, and the functional skills (we call these ‘Craft’) included in each framework reflect this. But Urban Sports Club are now aligned on core skillsets (’Human’ and ‘Leadership’) too. With Progression, all these skills come together in a single view, making it far easier for teams to understand what’s expected of them and how they fit into the bigger picture.

‘I like the eagle-view of the Career Framework for a selected team, where all skills, positions and required levels are juxtaposed. This is a very clear view that is easy to communicate internally and externally too.’ — Artur

The outcome

Now the team has clarity on their career path, and where they need to focus in order to succeed. Everything’s there, and totally transparent. In the last ten months, the framework’s been viewed over 3,000 times by the team.

Urban Sports Club has also kicked off a Check-in process for every member of the team, aligning their existing skillset with their respective role in the framework using our dedicated Check-ins feature.

The Progression roll out has been so successful that Urban Sports Club plans to extend it to the rest of the organisation, for all teams, and run their performance review process through the app too.

But they’re not stopping there. Urban Sports Club has shared some of their frameworks, Engineering, Product Analytics and Data Engineering, publicly, enabling potential new employees to better understand what they can expect from a career at the organisation.

Considering Progression? Here’s Artur’s top tip to get started

‘Just go heads-in exploring the skills library to see if there is something to build up a career framework with fast.’