One of the limitations of using Carta Compensation as our Market Data source is that Carta does not have every Buffer role available for benchmarking. This is especially true for Marketing and more specialized roles within Advocacy.

We tried several approaches to solving for this discrepancy. In the end, we decided that the most straightforward approach was to use the Carta data that was available and build upon it to establish our own data set for the missing roles.

We have two clear cases where we have found the need to establish our own roles that don’t exist in the Carta Market Data:

• Custom Roles: These are roles that simply are not present in Carta data at this time. The most typical reason is that the role is specialized, for example Product Marketer or Technical Advocate.
• Hybrid Roles: These are roles where we want to recognize someone is splitting their time equally between two roles. Hybrid Roles give us flexibility to create a salary that is an equal split between existing Carta Roles.
• Every other role, and the majority of roles are categorized as Carta Roles and are derived directly from Market data for the role.

The categorization of all roles at Buffer into these 3 types exists in the Role Mapping tab of the Buffer Benchmarks spreadsheet.

How Role Mapping Works

The Role Mappings tab within Buffer Benchmarks contains three options for Role Type: Carta Role or Custom Role or Hybrid Role

• When a Custom Role is established we apply a Custom Role Adjustment. We start with a general role for the area and then apply a percent “lift” or decrease to create the custom role. This is used to calibrate salaries to current rates. For example, this was particularly applicable for Marketing where Carta did not have data for all of our specialized roles. To solve for this we used a general Marketing Associate role and then applied a percent lift for each of our specializations.
• The Hybrid Second Role column is used to specify the second role for a hybrid role. The first role is specified in the Carta Role field. If a Hybrid Second Role is noted, the formula takes the benchmark data (at Level 5) and averages a 50/50 split of those roles to create the custom benchmark.

The Role Mapping gives us the flexibility to create internal roles where we would otherwise not have enough data, or where we are creating a role that’s unique to Buffer.

Why Custom and Hybrid roles exist within Buffer Benchmarks and not in the Market Data spreadsheet

You will see that we’ve built in the concept of Custom and Hybrid roles into the Buffer Benchmarks spreadsheet itself (see Role Mapping tab) instead of having that live within the Carta data sheet. A few reasons for this:

• Carta data sheet is intended to solely contain Carta data. Hybrid and Custom roles are not Carta data.
• Hybrid and Custom roles are derived from Carta data based on our own decisions (i.e. en extension of the Buffer Benchmarks)