"The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people." — W. Edwards Deming
This quote has guided how we think about engineering organizations. Too often, the conversation about engineering productivity focuses on measuring output — story points, lines of code, deployment frequency. These metrics have their place, but they miss the point. The real question isn't "how much are engineers producing?" It's "are we empowering engineers to have lasting impact on our business and customers?"
The Problem With Frameworks
Most career frameworks are written once, filed away, and never referenced again. They describe levels in vague terms — "demonstrates leadership" or "has broad impact" — that mean different things to different people. Engineers can't use them to grow. Managers can't use them to set clear expectations. And nobody can use them to tell an AI agent how the team actually works.
We think career frameworks should be living systems. They should be precise enough that a machine can validate them, but readable enough that an engineer can understand what's expected at any level. They should produce real outputs — job descriptions, agent profiles, interview questions, progression plans — not just sit in a wiki.
The Idea
Forward Impact Team starts from a simple premise: if you define what great engineering looks like, you can derive everything else from it.
Define your skills, behaviours, and career levels in plain YAML files. From that single source of truth, the system produces:
- Job definitions that combine discipline, track, and grade into clear role expectations
- AI agent profiles that match your engineering standards, scoped to specific lifecycle stages
- Interview questions grounded in the actual skills you care about
- Progression plans that show engineers exactly what changes between levels
- Knowledge systems that keep engineers briefed and organized
The framework isn't a bureaucratic exercise. It's infrastructure — the same way a CI pipeline is infrastructure. Once it's in place, everyone benefits from it continuously.
People, Not Process
Deming's insight is that quality comes from systems, not from inspecting individuals. When the system is right — when expectations are clear, tools are good, and people understand their path — quality follows naturally.
That's the design principle behind every product in the suite:
Map gives organizations a way to articulate what "good" looks like — not in vague terms, but in structured, validatable definitions that everyone can reference.
Pathway turns those definitions into things engineers actually use: career browsers, job descriptions, AI agents that follow team standards, and progression plans that make growth tangible.
Guide will connect these systems into context-aware AI assistance — onboarding, career advice, and problem-solving grounded in the team's actual framework, not generic best practices.
Basecamp gives engineers a personal operations center — scheduled AI tasks that sync information, prepare briefings, and organize knowledge so engineers can focus on the work that matters.
Together, these products don't monitor or measure engineers. They equip them. Clear expectations, visible career paths, intelligent assistance, and organized knowledge — the conditions under which people do their best work.
Open Source, Real World
The entire suite is open source. The data model is yours — defined in YAML, validated by schema, stored in your repository. Different organizations use the same model with completely different data. There's no vendor lock-in, no proprietary format, no SaaS dependency.
The tools are built with vanilla JavaScript, no frameworks, and designed to be simple rather than easy. Every design choice favours reducing complexity over hiding it.
Who We Are
Forward Impact Team is built and maintained by the Developer Experience team at a large pharmaceutical company. We work in an industry where technology serves a purpose beyond itself — where the software we build, the platforms we maintain, and the engineers we support contribute to outcomes that matter for patients' lives.
We built FIT because we believe the best way to have lasting positive impact is to empower the people doing the work. When engineers have clear expectations, visible growth paths, and tools that respect their craft, they deliver better software — and better software means better outcomes for the people who depend on it.