We just published something we're really proud of: our open-source guide to designing career paths.

Bright + Early guides are designed to walk you through, step-by-step, how we approach building each part of a modern, inclusive and well-designed people ops structure. They’re made for founders, operations folks, and HR pros who want to tackle the work themselves, but don’t know where to get started.

If you've been putting this off because it feels like a big, complicated HR project, that's exactly why we made it. This guide walks you through every step (with examples!) so you can build something real; something based on how you actually work and what you actually value, not a template borrowed from a company three times your size or in a different industry altogether.

This one is especially important; having well-defined paths is the core of a well-oiled people system. They shape who you hire and how you evaluate them. They give performance reviews and feedback conversations something to stand on. They connect directly to pay, to promotions, and to how your values actually show up in practice, not just on a slide deck sent during onboarding and forgotten. When they're missing, a lot of things get decided on ~vibes~ (not cool).

This guide covers the whole process: defining your values-based competencies, mapping levels, building department-specific paths, placing your team, and rolling it all out so it lands. There's also a new section at each step re: where AI can genuinely help (hint: drafting and synthesizing) and where it really can't (you can’t generate your values without an actual conversation, sorry).

Building custom career paths is also something we do with clients, and we've designed a lot of them, from early-stage startups formalizing things for the first time to large nonprofits refining how they think about growth. So why give away the sauce for free? Our mission is to help people build great places to work. Whether that’s through partnering with us or tackling it on their own, mission fulfilled.

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