Building a lightweight competency matrix after years of messy spreadsheets
Hey everyone,
After spending many years working as a manager in software teams, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern across different organizations. Developers are expected to grow, improve, and move to the next level, but the expectations behind that growth are often unclear or undocumented.
Requirements exist, yet they live in people’s heads rather than in a shared, visible place. This makes it hard to answer simple questions like what skills actually matter, what “ready for the next level” means, or which goals should be prioritized to move forward.
As a result, evaluations can feel subjective, feedback varies between managers, and career progression becomes difficult to navigate. This is rarely intentional, but it becomes more common as teams scale.
To explore this problem, I started building Matricsy, a competency matrix tool focused on simple evaluations, clear skill definitions, and data instead of assumptions. The goal is to make expectations visible and growth conversations more concrete.
Great idea! I’ve used competency matrices across multiple teams and orgs, and they always end up as messy spreadsheets. Curious how an app could fix that; will it provide enough flexibility to support the battle-tested best practices from years of experience?
Yes, exactly. At the beginning we were also using competency matrices in Excel, and it quickly turned into a mess that was hard to maintain.
The matrix itself was in one place, notes and goal setting based on it somewhere else, and in the end each manager handled it in their own way.
Here everything is in one place. There is a lot of flexibility when it comes to configuring and editing the matrix, running evaluations, using ready to use templates to get started faster, analyzing data through charts, and so on :)