War-game a compensation band before level definitions, geo differentials, and exception paths harden into how every offer and promotion is priced.
Compensation bands fail when levels are named without shared definitions, when geo differentials live in a manager's memory, when exceptions become the hiring path under pressure, and when "market data" is a screenshot nobody can re-run. A tidy people-ops slide is not evidence.
Freeze first
State the roles and levels the band covers, the geo and remote rules, who approves exceptions, how offers and promotions map to the same ranges, and the success metric after two hiring cohorts. Attach leveling guides, market data sources, equity overlays, and the kill criteria if acceptance rates or internal fairness claims break. If people ops, finance, and hiring managers disagree on who can break band, reconcile before seating.
Name the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new, and the hold criteria if any level lacks a written definition or a measured exception rate.
Attack surfaces
- Level fiction: titles that imply ranges the guide never wrote.
- Exception theater: approvals that never log and become the real path.
- Geo blur: remote and office rules that conflict under the same level.
- Equity gap: cash bands that ignore equity overlays candidates already compare.
- Internal fairness: promotions that land outside the published range without a story.
Optional counsel seat if pay transparency or equal-pay rules bind disclosure. Optional finance seat if the band moves budget or equity burn.
How to run it
Feed Pingpong the draft bands, leveling guide, and open risk list. Early passes steelman the ranges. Later passes attack from candidate, hiring manager, people ops, finance, and skeptic seats. End with a pass that turns surviving objections into clearer levels, tighter exception logs, or a hold. Delete invented "we are at the 75th percentile" claims and dual-counted market screenshots.
Ask people ops and finance seats to price the first contested offer under the new band. If day-one language promises fairness that exceptions will erase by week two, candidates and employees will learn the real policy from gossip. Write the intended exception owners, the disclosure rules, and the language you will refuse, then attack whether hiring still works under that discipline.
Force a day-after narrative: what happens if a candidate screenshots a peer's higher band, if a geo rule collapses under a remote hire, or if promotions stack above the published max. If those stories are stronger than your mitigation plan, fix the package before you publish. Related: war-game a hiring plan, war-game a headcount plan, war-game a promotion decision, war-game a sales compensation plan, and the war-game decisions hub. Process: how to run a Pingpong.