Career ladder
I've found a career ladder helpful for structuring my professional development and making promotion discussions more objective.
Buffer is generally open with their corporate policies. Here's Buffer's ladder.
Here's a simple example:
| Rung | Difficulty | Impact |
| 1 | Executing delegated tasks | Individual |
| 2 | Proposing tasks required to build product features | Team |
| 3 | Coordinating development for a product area, eg architecture | Org |
| 4 | Coordinating development for all product areas, eg CTO | Company |
| 5 | Coordinating tech across companies, eg Fellow | Industry |
Each rung is broadly defined and would have an associated compensation range, eg "pay band", providing room to grow.
Given such a ladder, employees can perform their own career planning, review peers' performance against self-assessments based on a common structure, and initiate discussions regarding promotion based on an objective measure.
Related, although there are management aspects to senior IC roles, I'm a fan of maintaining a distinct ladder for IC and management. ICs manage projects. Managers manage people. They collaborate continuously, but are evaluated differently.