“When roles are unclear, leadership gets harder.”
Alku ARCHITECTURE™
A practical role and leveling baseline
Alku ARCHITECTURE helps founder-led companies make roles, levels, and expectations clearer as the team grows. It creates a practical role and leveling baseline for hiring, onboarding, development, performance conversations, and pay transparency readiness without overbuilding a heavy HR architecture. Titles and levels shouldn’t be a constant debate. But when roles grow organically, they often become one.
The problem this module solves
When roles and levels don’t mean the same thing across the company, expectations stay implicit.
People don’t know what good looks like.
Managers struggle to give fair feedback.
Hiring decisions become harder.
Titles become emotional.
Progression starts to feel unclear or political.
What this often looks like today:
role descriptions vary wildly, or don’t exist at all
titles and levels have developed organically and no longer mean the same thing across teams
people have different assumptions about responsibility, seniority, autonomy, and impact
managers struggle with expectations, feedback, promotion, and hiring decisions because roles are not clearly defined
team members don’t see a clear path to grow
compensation and progression discussions become reactive
the EU Pay Transparency Directive deadline is here, but you don’t yet have a clear role and leveling baseline to build from
Why this is a risk right now:
As you grow, ambiguity scales.
Without a role and leveling baseline, you end up patching confusion with process instead of fixing the foundation.
A minimum viable job architecture gives you a practical way to make expectations, comparability, and progression clearer, before role ambiguity becomes heavy to correct.
Who this is for
Alku ARCHITECTURE™ is a good fit if you:
need clearer role expectations and levels to support hiring, onboarding, and performance conversations
have inconsistent titles and levels across teams and want a defensible baseline
see growing frustration around career progression and role clarity
want a “good enough v1” role architecture without overbuilding a heavy program
want managers to have a clearer basis for expectations, feedback, development, and progression discussions
are an SME or micro business looking to prepare for pay transparency in a practical, lightweight way
Not for
Alku ARCHITECTURE™ is not a fit if you want to start with:
compensation benchmarking
salary bands
legal compliance sign-off
a full pay model redesign
an enterprise-level career framework
HRIS or tooling implementation
This module starts with the foundation: clear roles, levels, expectations, and comparability.
Further compensation or pay transparency work can be added after the baseline is in place.
Legal compliance and country-specific legal advice are handled separately.
What you’ll walk away with
By the end of Alku ARCHITECTURE, you have:
A practical role and leveling baseline that makes expectations clearer across the company
Consistent role clarity to support hiring, onboarding, feedback, and development
A role matrix that helps compare roles more fairly and reduce political debate around titles and levels
Role description baselines you can reuse and scale
A clearer foundation for progression discussions so growth feels less ad hoc
A stronger basis for pay transparency readiness, if relevant
A clearer view of what may need to be developed next, such as compensation logic, pay bands, or more detailed career paths
The goal is not to create a heavy HR architecture.
The goal is to build enough structure so people know what is expected, managers have a fairer basis for decisions, and the company can grow with less ambiguity.
How it works
Alku ARCHITECTURE builds a minimum viable role and leveling baseline you can scale.
The default model is Alku-led: I produce the first drafts within the agreed scope, and we calibrate them together with the CEO, leadership team, and/or HR.
The work is structured in core phases:
1. Scope & readiness lock-in
We clarify why role architecture is needed now, what decisions it should support, and where to start.
This includes defining the scope: all roles, one job family, critical roles, or the part of the organization where ambiguity is creating the most friction.
2. Minimum Viable Job Architecture
We build the practical baseline:
role list
leveling logic
role comparison criteria
practical role matrix
role description baseline
first calibration with leadership and/or HR
Optional next step: Pay transparency readiness support
Once the role and leveling baseline is in place, optional next steps can include pay transparency readiness support, such as an initial view into potential pay gaps and practical next steps.
If you have in-house HR capacity and prefer to draft internally, a lighter HR-led model is also possible.
We’ll decide the best format in the Intro Call.
Case: From role ambiguity to a clear structure
Context
The company had grown without a clear role structure.
Titles had developed organically, role descriptions were missing or inconsistent, and there was no shared logic for levels, career progression, role comparison, compensation, or what was expected in each role.
What changed
The company moved from ambiguity and reactivity to a clearer, more predictable structure.
Employees gained better visibility into what was expected in their roles, how roles differed from each other, and what the next level required.
Managers and leadership gained a practical foundation for career progression, salary planning, development discussions, and compensation decisions.
What we worked on
We created the minimum viable architecture: listed existing roles, built a role matrix, defined common role evaluation criteria, clarified job levels, drafted role descriptions, and placed roles into the matrix for better comparability.
Where relevant, the work also included pay gap analysis, pay bands, and documentation of the compensation and benefits logic.
What this looked like in practice
Employees were left to interpret role expectations on their own.
Career progression depended too much on individual initiative and the manager they happened to have. Salary and development discussions were reactive, often only happening when an employee asked for them.
What the client said
“Before this work, people were often left guessing what was expected in their roles and how they could move forward. The new structure made roles, levels, and compensation easier to understand, and gave managers a much better basis for development and promotion discussions.”
— CEO, growth-stage company
Investment
From €4,900 (+ VAT)
Alku ARCHITECTURE is priced based on scope, number of roles, delivery model, and whether optional pay transparency readiness support is included.
The core package includes scope lock-in, role and level baseline, practical role matrix, and role description baseline within the agreed scope.
Final scope and pricing are confirmed together before delivery.
How to start
Start with a 45-minute Intro Call.
We’ll clarify what you need role clarity for: hiring, progression, performance, pay transparency readiness, or something else.
Then we’ll decide the best delivery model and agree on a realistic starting scope.
FAQ
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No.
The default model is Alku-led, where I produce the first drafts and we calibrate them together.
If you have in-house HR capacity and prefer to draft internally, a lighter HR-led model is also possible.
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Not fully.
ARCHITECTURE creates the foundation: role descriptions, leveling logic, and a practical role matrix.
It makes progression clearer and more consistent, but it is not a full career framework program.
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No. It is pay transparency readiness.
We help you build a practical role and leveling baseline and, if you choose the optional phases, an initial view into potential pay gaps to inform next steps.
Legal compliance and country-specific legal advice are handled separately.
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We build the role and leveling baseline first.
If you choose optional pay transparency readiness support, we can support an initial gap view to inform priorities and next steps.
This is not legal advice or a full compliance sign-off.
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Start with the most critical roles, one job family, or the part of the company where role clarity is currently creating the most friction.
If you only have around 15–20 roles, it may be feasible to include them all.