Templates
Skill

Attention to Detail

The ability to focus on details and spot issues with your own and others' work

Attention to Detail

Level 1

Completes tasks to a good level of detail. Maps out failure states. Thinks about interaction details.

  • Craft quality: You complete small projects with little need for revision or further work. You're consistently detailed in your explanations of your work in critique.

  • Documentation: You document your work and files thoughtfully, allowing others to pick up where you left off.

  • Scenario planning: You can demonstrate being able to think through various journeys or outcomes in small pieces of work and design for them.

Level 2

Completes larger projects to a good level of detail. Teases out edge-cases and designs for them. Defends the details and owns their execution.

  • Craft quality: You can complete larger projects, possibly leading the design phase, giving stakeholders and leaders confidence in the depth of your thinking around the solution.

  • Documentation: You go out of your way to ensure that you're being a good citizen - documenting your process and thinking as well as maintaining immaculate naming and file structuring conventions.

  • Scenario planning: You repeatedly demonstrate being able to think through more complex situations and design for failure states and imperfect outcomes, and can point to how that's helped those working from your designs

Level 3

Completes large projects meticulously, helps peers to do the same. Flags pieces of work outside their own which haven't been thought through and supports improvements. Inspires rigor in others.

  • Craft quality: You work on several large projects, possibly new feature or product launches, of major strategic importance. The work you produce is of consistently excellent quality, and your depth of thinking impresses team members and others across your organisation.

  • Documentation: You define a process that your peers are keeping to around ensuring that everyone can work well together. You find people to help you build and adopt tools to automate best practice. Your documentation is spotless and held up as the gold standard.

  • Scenario planning: You repeatedly help those around you to think through their work and find holes in their thinking. Your reputation as detail-oriented means you're invited to workshops and brainstorms with those outside your peers.

Level 4

Brings quality up in product teams and departments. Builds process to help others to improve the quality and detail of their own work. Recognised team-wide as having an eagle eye.

  • Craft quality: You see issues with quality and attention to detail in your wider team, and worked to establish processes and expectations that make it clearer and easier for others to produce great work. Your work is consistently exceptional in its intellectual rigour.

  • Documentation: You're making meaningful and demonstrable efficiency gains through encouraging adoption of better ways of working through and handing off detailed documentation. You're writing about your work, championing it amongst your organisation.

  • Scenario planning: You are a valuable asset for those looking to strategise and think through ideas, as demonstrated by your opinion being regularly required in reviewing the work of non-designers and designers alike.

Level 5

Known company-wide as having an exceptionally high quality bar. Involved in the most critical projects company-wide because of their attention to detail.

  • Craft quality: You lift the quality of work across your entire organisation, resulting in measurable improvements in user experience, customer happiness or team efficiency. The products you oversee are demonstrably better for your efforts.

  • Documentation: You put in place processes and tools to ensure that even those who aren't detail-oriented are able to contribute to a high quality - across design documentation, technical handoff and quality assurance. Your process is demonstrably impacting build speed and quality across the board.

  • Scenario planning: You play a major strategic role in your organisation, and a critical part in thinking through company-wide initiatives, both product and internally. Org-facing activity is given your critical eye, and with good reason: you regularly find ways to improve and avoid bad outcomes through your ability to imagine scenarios that no-one else can.

Build your own framework for free