What is job title mapping?
Job title mapping is the process of classifying job titles, the ones people actually carry on their offer letters and email signatures, into a standard level and track so they can be compared and planned against. It is sometimes called job title taxonomy, job title classification, or job title category mapping, and it is the practical first step of building a career ladder or a job architecture: before you can define what "the next level" means, you need to know where everyone currently sits.
The problem it solves is straightforward to state and genuinely hard to do by hand. Titles are not standardized across companies, and often not even across departments in the same company. "Manager" means people-manager in Operations and individual contributor in Product. "Head of X" means the most senior person in the function at a startup, and a regional lead two rungs below the VP at a larger company. "Lead" can go either way depending on the team. Mapping titles by scope, autonomy, and influence instead of by the words in the title is the only approach that holds up across functions.
What is in the download?
The Excel file has five sheets:
- Title Mapping sheet. The working sheet. Enter your organization's actual titles, then use the dropdowns to record job family, track, level, and seniority band for each one. Blank rows, ready to fill in.
- Level Reference sheet. Defines L1 through L6 on the individual contributor track and M1 through M5 on the manager track, each by scope, autonomy, and influence rather than by title or tenure. This is the scale everything else in the workbook maps against.
- Job Families sheet. The typical title chain for 10 functions, Engineering, Product, Design, Data, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Operations, Finance, and People/HR, mapped against the same level structure, so a Director in one function lines up with a Director in another.
- Title Variants sheet. The reference table for the titles that cause the most mapping confusion, Staff vs. Lead vs. Principal, Head of X vs. Director vs. VP, Manager titles that are actually IC roles, with a disambiguation note for each.
- Filled-In Example sheet. A worked example based on a company that inherited inconsistent titles after two acquisitions, including two people with the identical title, "Operations Manager," who land at different levels once their actual scope is checked.
Already on Harmny? Once your levels and job families are mapped, skip re-typing them into a framework by hand. Set up your career framework →
How to map job titles to levels, step by step
- List every current title. Pull the actual titles from your HRIS or org chart, not a job description library. Duplicates and near-duplicates ("Sr. Engineer" and "Senior Engineer") are expected at this stage; do not clean them up yet.
- Ignore the title text and start with scope. For each person, ask what they actually own: a task, a project, a function, or a company-wide domain. Scope is the most reliable signal and the hardest one to fake with a title alone.
- Check autonomy and influence. Are this person's decisions reviewed before they go out, or trusted without review? Does their work affect their own team, their function, or the whole company? These two questions plus scope are what the Level Reference sheet is built around.
- Assign track before level. Confirm whether the person has direct reports. This resolves most of the ambiguous cases in the Title Variants sheet, Manager, Lead, and Head of X titles all depend on this one fact.
- Record the level and seniority band. With scope, autonomy, influence, and track established, the level (L1-L6 or M1-M5) and seniority band follow directly. Use the Job Families sheet to sanity-check the result against how that function is usually structured.
IC track vs. manager track
Every level structure in the download runs two parallel tracks. The individual contributor (IC) track, L1 through L6, describes people who advance by increasing the scope and difficulty of their own work, not by acquiring direct reports. The manager track, M1 through M5, describes people who advance by increasing the scope of what they lead through others. A credible structure keeps both tracks open at senior levels; if the IC track stops at L3 and everyone above that has to manage people to keep growing, you do not have two tracks, you have one track with an early fork.
The engineering function is usually the clearest example of a fully built-out dual track, and our engineering career ladder guide covers it in depth, including the compensation-parity condition that makes a dual ladder credible rather than advisory. The same logic applies outside engineering: a Staff Customer Success Manager and a Customer Success Team Lead can be at comparable seniority on different tracks, and a mapping exercise that forces every senior CSM into a management title is misreading the org, not fixing it.
What to do with inherited, inconsistent titles
Companies that grow by acquisition end up with the worst version of this problem: the same scope of work titled three different ways across three legacy companies, plus titles that were negotiated individually and no longer reflect anyone's actual role. The instinct is to rename everyone immediately. Resist it.
Map first, rename later, and treat them as two separate projects. Mapping is an analysis exercise: it does not require anyone's agreement, and it can proceed even while people keep their existing titles on paper. Renaming is a communications and negotiation exercise, has real morale stakes, and should happen deliberately once the mapping shows you the actual shape of the organization. The Filled-In Example sheet in the download works through exactly this scenario, including two people who share the identical title and land two levels apart once their scope is checked.
How job families relate to levels
Keep these two ideas separate, even though they live in the same workbook. A level (L3, M2, and so on) is a horizontal comparison: it says how senior someone is relative to anyone else at that level, regardless of function. A job family is a vertical title chain: it says what the actual titles look like as someone in Engineering, Marketing, or Customer Success moves up through the levels. The Job Families sheet exists because "L3" alone is not useful to hand to a hiring manager, they need to know that L3 in their function is called Senior Software Engineer, or Senior Customer Success Manager, or Senior Financial Analyst. The level structure is what makes those three titles comparable to each other; the job family is what makes each one legible inside its own function.
Job title mapping vs. career ladder vs. competency matrix
These three tools solve related but different problems:
- Job title mapping classifies your existing, real-world titles against a level structure. This is a diagnostic exercise: it tells you where people currently sit. This is what you are downloading.
- Career ladder defines the levels themselves for a specific function, including the titles, scope, and promotion criteria at each one. See our career ladder examples by role for 41 functions, or the career progression framework guide for how ladders fit into a full framework.
- Competency matrix measures a specific person against the behavioral expectations at their level, once you know what that level is. Download our free competency matrix template for that step.
In practice, the order runs title mapping first, career ladder definition second, and competency matrix evaluation third. You cannot calibrate a Senior Engineer's competencies without first agreeing that they are, in fact, a Senior Engineer and not a Staff Engineer with an outdated title.