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Making a Career

Advancing your career at Jesus Film doesn’t mean giving up on your craft. Whether you work in programming, design, ops, support, or whatever, you can become better at the work itself and level-up that way. This is especially important since we’re a relatively small team with just two layers of managerial cake: executives and team managers. And both the executives and managers still spend the majority of their time doing actual product work!

Within each of our job functions, we’ve mapped our trajectory of mastery to five different levels. That title structure is shared amongst all departments, but the particulars of what characterizes one level from another will of course be different. Here’s an example of the titles for product engineering:

  • Junior Product Engineer
  • Product Engineer
  • Senior Product Engineer
  • Lead Product Engineer
  • Principal Product Engineer

While this is how we recognize mastery, it’s by no means an expectation that everyone will start as a junior and end up as a principal. Jesus Film needs people and perspectives from all levels of skill. And for those who do end up progressing all the way through this path, it may well be a journey of many, many years, if not a decade+.

But these titles make it clear to everyone where someone is in their career progression at Jesus Film. Note that these titles are about a particular role at Jesus Film. Someone may well have been a "Senior Designer" somewhere else with a different assessment criteria and a different workflow, and then still start at Jesus Film as a "Designer". We recognize mastery and titles at Jesus Film for the work done at Jesus Film.

Day to day, though, these titles aren’t really much of a factor. But they do give newcomers another way of orienting themselves at the organization and it gives everyone a clear way of tracking their personal career progression at Jesus Film.

You can see the specific titles and proficiencies expected for: Designers and Engineers.

Performance Feedback

At least once a year, employees meet with their manager for a formal performance check-in. It’s up to each manager to determine how best to approach that meeting, but we ask that whatever process they use, they use the same process for every team member. Managers should have a conversation with teammates about:

  • daily work content and load
  • overall work satisfaction
  • relationships with the team, manager, and organization
  • thoughts about personal growth and how those impact working at Jesus Film

This is a two-way street! Employees should be offering thoughts on these topics, and managers should be giving feedback about employee performance in these areas. Managers document performance reviews along with any action items with deadlines that come out of the meeting. The timing and cadence of performance reviews is up to each individual manager with input from HR.

Performance Plans

If an employee's feedback relationship with their manager and team is where it should be, nothing too surprising should be coming out of performance reviews. Managers should be addressing performance successes and problems in the moment, throughout the year, not waiting for a formal opportunity. If some unforeseen negative feedback does come out, managers could decide to initiate our formal performance plan process.