The Growth Framework: Maslow, applied to people

The moment this framework clicked for me was, fittingly, in a product meeting. We were mapping why users churned from a client's app, and the answer had layers: some left because the basics failed them (it was slow, it lost their data), some because they never found their people in it, some because they'd stopped getting better at anything inside it. Nobody churns for one reason; they churn from whichever layer is broken. Driving home it occurred to me that every resignation letter I'd ever read had the same structure - and that we already owned a perfectly good model for it, because Maslow drew the layers in 1943.

The Growth Framework is Maslow's hierarchy applied to how we grow people at the studio, on the theory that careers work like lasting products: you can't retain at the top of the pyramid while leaking at the bottom, the levels have to be built in order, and the job of the organisation (like the job of a good product) is to notice which level is wobbling for each person before they notice it themselves.

The five levels, translated

1. Foundations - the physiological layer: fair pay reviewed without being begged for, tools that work, hours that are survivable, and the psychological safety to say 'I'm underwater' without career consequence. Nothing above this level functions while it's shaky, and no ping-pong table compensates for it.
2. Belonging - a pod to call home, work that's genuinely shared rather than adjacent, and the unglamorous rituals (standups that are actually conversations, retros where the truth is safe) that turn colleagues into a team.
3. Recognition - being seen accurately: craft noticed by people qualified to notice it, ownership given in public, growth reflected in title and money without a negotiation campaign. The accurately part matters - generic praise is to recognition what a loyalty scheme is to loyalty.
4. Mastery - getting properly good: deep work in your craft, deliberate stretch, mentorship in both directions, and the space (Labs days, conference time, the hard project) to become the person others learn from.
5. Purpose - the top of the pyramid and the only level that compounds on its own: work that matters beyond the invoice, a hand in shaping the studio itself, and the mentoring, tf4good and community work where experience gets given away. People at this level don't need retaining; they do the retaining.

No one churns from the top of the pyramid. They churn from whichever level is broken.

The rule that makes it a framework, not a poster

The operating rule is the same one Maslow proposed and every product funnel confirms: levels are built in order, and a wobble at a lower level drains everything above it. The practical consequence is diagnostic discipline - when someone's engagement dips, the lazy read is always a top-of-pyramid story ('they need a new challenge') and the true read is very often lower ('they haven't had a raise conversation in eighteen months and their laptop takes four minutes to boot'). We train leads to check the pyramid from the bottom up, because prescribing mastery for a foundations problem is how you lose good people while congratulating yourself on the development budget.

The framework runs through the studio's actual machinery rather than living in a slide. Growth conversations are structured as a walk up the levels (what's wobbling, what's solid, what's next), each level has concrete levers a lead can actually pull - foundations problems get fixed with fair pay, the right tools and load-balancing, not with encouragement - and progression here is explicitly framed as climbing, with seniority meaning you spend more of your time at mastery and purpose, including the responsibility to hold the lower levels steady for others.

Why the product framing matters

Talking about people the way we talk about products sounds cold until you notice what it imports: honesty disciplines that HR language usually lacks. Products get instrumented rather than surveyed annually; churn gets a post-mortem instead of a farewell card; and 'engagement' has to mean observed behaviour, not a score on a form. Applied to people, that means noticing the person who's stopped actively participating in Labs, treating an exit interview as data about the pyramid rather than about the individual, and accepting that retention is an outcome you architect - level by level - rather than a mood you hope for.

The framework is deliberately simple enough to sketch in a one-on-one, and that's where it earns its keep - not as policy, but as a shared language for the conversation every growing person eventually needs to have: here's the level that's wobbling, here's what we're going to do about it, in order. Products that look after their users' whole hierarchy keep them for years, and it turns out people work exactly the same way, because of course they do. Maslow got there eighty years before any of our retention dashboards did.