Mindvalley Customer Success Story: Kaleida, our partner in building a happier, more productive technology team

The following case study is written from the perspective of Mindvalley's CTO, Norman Noble, sharing their experience with implementing Kaleida's career framework in their organisation.

Mindvalley is a company dedicated to supporting personal growth and transformation, not just in career and professional skills but also in other aspects of life that make it fulfilling, such as mental well-being, family, and relationships. 

Mindvalley’s technology transformation

At the end of 2023, we set out to implement a large-scale transformation program in our technology department. This involved reorganising our 120-strong product and engineering team into value streams more closely aligned to the customer lifecycle, and the introduction of a formal career framework for our software engineering staff.

As CTO, one of my primary objectives was to resolve the lack of clarity surrounding career progression for our technology staff. I had heard feedback from some team members that they struggled to see how they could advance their careers at Mindvalley. My goal was to ensure that all the engineers had clarity about their skills, potential for growth, and the value they could contribute to the organisation.

“My goal was to ensure that all the engineers had clarity about their skills, potential for growth, and value they could contribute to the organisation.”

I also wanted to understand our skill distribution and gaps on an aggregate level. Our previous system for levelling and performance management was generic and clunky. How do you get a collective view of the team if the data is stored on 120 separate Google Sheets? I needed quick insights to guide team members in developing skills aligned with the company's needs, and to collaborate with HR on L&D and hiring plans for the short, medium, and long term.

Summary of key challenges

The three problems I was keen to solve were:

1. Direction: Addressing questions about career direction and progression for our software engineers.
2. Development: Getting a holistic view of the team’s skills, and identifying gaps for L&D and hiring purposes.
3. Alignment: Using the platform for our engineers to create action plans tied to the company goal-setting system. 

Choosing Kaleida as our career framework

Creating your own career framework from scratch is a complex undertaking. It requires a huge amount of time, expertise, and collective leadership that can distract engineering leaders from their day-to-day work. The risk of a DIY approach is ending up with something that isn’t fit for purpose.

I had been following Kaleida with interest for some time and knew that they were specialists in designing and embedding structured career frameworks in tech organisations. This seemed like the right opportunity to introduce the platform at Mindvalley. It made sense now to bring them in as part of our broader transformation program.  

The onboarding process

We did a pilot rollout of the Kaleida platform to half the software engineers in the department. The onboarding process was very comprehensive. The Kaleida team ran a series of workshops on how to use the tool, answering questions along the way and taking feedback to improve the user experience. It was great to see how responsive they were. Essentially, they took on a proactive co-creator role in implementing Mindvalley’s software engineering career framework.

Kaleida’s impact

Consistency in benchmarking and career progression

In the span of only a few months, we started to see positive results. Kaleida gave us a consistent framework to unify standards and define skills and levels across our engineering teams. At Mindvalley, the engineering teams naturally focus on different skills in their toolkit depending on the projects they are working on at the time. Still, there needs to be some uniformity in the way they are benchmarked and levelled across teams for fairness and transparency. 

Kaleida gave us a consistent language. You’re not saying one thing to one engineer and something else entirely to another engineer because the mental model in your head is slightly different that day. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a senior engineer in one value stream versus another, you’re looking at one standard. This framework is something that can be easily visualised and explained to stakeholders, all the way from executives, senior leaders and first-line managers to individual contributors.

Improving employee engagement and retention

One of the clearest signals of Kaleida’s positive impact was a significant dropoff in comments from the team on a lack of clarity on career progression. From my dashboard, I can see that a high percentage of the engineers have completed their self-assessments. I’m not a believer in forcing tools onto people, since I believe that tools should live and die by the value they provide. So the high usage is telling me that the team finds Kaleida valuable.

Some of the engineering managers use Kaleida’s contribution framework in their weekly and biweekly one-on-ones with their team members to shape their conversations. People have a lot more clarity on their goals and have better quality conversations on how they are tracking. I’m hearing from my engineering managers that people are starting to talk about their development and demand clarity on what they are expected to do. 

There’s also a stronger sense of ownership around their own growth and development. We have central DevOps and Security functional teams that are separate from the product-focused engineering teams, but our software engineers are thoughtfully and intentionally incorporating DevOps and security skills (core software engineering skills) into their day-to-day work and sharing their knowledge with their peers.  

Another indicator I’m proud of is our strong employee retention rate. People can find change hard and aren't always aligned with the new direction, so I’m pleased that after our big reset, our retention rates didn’t drop and remained stable. I credit this to the restructure, the introduction of Kaleida, and Mindvalley’s organisational culture, which emphasises personal growth and transformation, for contributing to this stability and helping people be receptive to change.

Supporting succession planning and leadership development 

Kaleida has been a great tool to support our L&D and workforce planning. I get a bird’s eye view of our engineers’ current and aspirational skill levels, which gives me good insights into our seniority and skill distribution. At the start of each quarter, I look at the team dashboard to get a baseline of our biggest skill gaps, and then work with the Head of Engineering and our L&D Manager to prioritise getting training done. 

It also helps us with hiring, backfilling and succession planning. For example, if there are too many seniors on one team, this could cause challenges in future as there would be a bottleneck for managerial positions. We use these insights to inform our planning and look at ways we can redistribute our talent to support individual aspirations while still meeting company goals. 

Kaleida provides a structured way for team members to document their contributions and impact, so we have an additional tool to help set clear expectations around promotions. This clarity helps both managers and team members understand the growth and evidence required to support promotion requests. By using Kaleida alongside other evaluation criteria, we have been able to enhance the overall quality of our promotion process, ensuring it remains fair, merit-based, and aligned with broader company goals.

“As a manager, there are a lot of things that take a while to learn, like performance management, communication, mentoring and how to have difficult conversations. Kaleida puts structure and visibility around these aspects, which makes it easy for leaders to know what to focus on when guiding their team members.”

My engineering managers have also told me that Kaleida has been helpful in their own leadership development, particularly for those newer to the role. As a manager, there are a lot of things that take a while to learn, like performance management, communication, mentoring and how to have difficult conversations. Kaleida puts structure and visibility around these aspects, which makes it easy for leaders to know what to focus on when guiding their team members.

Conclusion

Kaleida has been instrumental in the broader transformation program we’ve embedded in the Mindvalley technology team. Growth is not always easy, and there are challenges that come with reshaping the team and completely realigning our ways of working. 

With Kaleida, I understand the playing field better. We now have a consistent framework that lets us define and unify our skills and levels across the engineering teams and identify gaps. Our engineers have a clear picture of career progression, and we’re seeing improvements in motivation since we have more structure around goal-setting, career and performance conversations, promotion criteria, and leadership development.

Before this, people would use a lot of subjective, anecdotal feedback. Kaleida gives me better insights into the group of people I’m working with and a better awareness of what to think about when aligning what we need to do as a business. As a result, I’m glad to say that we have a happier, more engaged, and productive technology team.

"With Kaleida, I understand the playing field better… Kaleida gives me better insights into the group of people I’m working with and a better awareness of what to think about when aligning what we need to do as a business. As a result, I’m glad to say that we have a happier, more engaged, and productive technology team."