Take the engineering re-leveling from principle to a concrete ladder - 13 levels down to 4 (open to a 5th), leadership down to Director and VP - and commit that no mapping ships without the direct report in the room

Situation

Across three 1:1s on Aug 13 (Nathan, Steve, Ryan) Peter walked each direct report through a spreadsheet he had shown nobody, collapsing roughly 13 engineering levels into Engineer / Senior / Principal / Distinguished, and collapsing his own leadership layer from directors, senior directors and head-of titles down to Director and VP. Nathan argued for a fifth level (Staff) to separate Jeremy from Sultan; Peter took it as reasonable without committing. Ryan was placed in the VP bucket and told so directly. Peter named two hard constraints: nobody gets a pay cut, and existing option grants cannot legally be reduced. Timeline given to Ryan: weeks, not months. Sequence: get Mariah bought into the framework first, then walk each org through its own mapping.

Reasoning

The 13 levels are not a cosmetic problem - they are the reason he cannot answer a compensation question. As long as a Director with no reports sits at the same nominal level as a Director running an org, there is no denominator against which to say a person is underpaid relative to peers. Peter said this plainly to Nathan: get to a smaller surface of titles, and then we can have a conversation much more easily about relative compensation numbers. The ladder is instrumentation for the comp and equity work, not an end in itself. He is also deliberately unreligious about the details - not religious about four versus five, do not care what you call the titles as long as they map to the level - because the thing he needs is a single scale, not a particular scale.

Additional Context

This is the third appearance of the leveling review (7/10 launched it, 7/30 established it lands as a conversation not a directive). What is new is that it is now a concrete artifact with named levels and named people mapped into them, and that it has an explicit dependency chain: Mariah first, then each direct report, then rollout.

Observed Evidence

Peter to Nathan: I got something like 13 different levels across all of engineering, which makes no sense. ... I have directors of engineering who do not have any direct reports. Peter to Ryan: I am just trying to knock it down to like four levels, and then I can have people stop pointing at each other saying, why is that person a different level than me. On constraints: There is nobody I am asking to cut pay on. And you cannot legally cut options.

Matching Patterns

Confidence Breakdown

Reasoning Depth Analysis