IC practice · Working draft
Grow craft into judgement and influence.
Senior individual contribution is not just greater execution speed. It is the ability to frame ambiguous work, raise quality across a system, and make other people’s decisions better.
The progression here moves from delivering a defined experience to shaping the problem, connecting evidence to strategy, and creating reusable standards that improve work beyond one project.
What the skill looks like in practice.
Problem framing
Turn an unclear request into a useful decision, an explicit hypothesis, and a tractable scope.
Portfolio evidenceFreddy AI reframed a navigation request as an activation and information-architecture problem.Interaction craft
Design behaviour, states, flow, feedback, error handling, and information hierarchy—not just screens.
Portfolio evidenceSAP Ariba kept invoice context visible while bringing resolution to the exception.Evidence and evaluation
Choose research and evaluation methods that reduce the most consequential uncertainty.
Portfolio evidenceAthenahealth moved product definition and early evidence one release ahead.Systems thinking
Recognise repeated decisions and turn them into principles, patterns, components, or shared language.
Portfolio evidenceQapita connected personas, principles, component resilience, and impact evidence.Strategic influence
Make trade-offs legible and build alignment without relying on positional authority.
Portfolio evidenceOracle scenarios brought assumptions, risk, cost, and value into one decision space.Outcome fluency
Connect experience quality to adoption, retention, risk, efficiency, or commercial performance.
Portfolio evidenceFreddy’s clearer structure was connected to adoption and revenue outcomes.Reference material
External perspectives used to shape this draft. These are starting points, not a claim of a universal competency model.