What kind of scope are we talking about here? Is the L5 charged with "the website should load a bit faster", or "the flagship product is not competitive in the market"? Is the L6 individually grappling with "where will the entire industry be in ten years"?
I’ll defer to a developer for a better example. Even though my background is as a developer and my specialty in the consulting department is “application modernization” meaning I mostly work with application development using cloud services and “DevOps”, I don’t know how it maps to software development requirements.
For the consulting department, we are given a customer project. Depending on the complexity of a project, it will be split into “work streams”
L6 - the project lead responsible for understanding the scope of the entire project, how multiple teams work together and should be “strategic”. They should be able to suss out the customer’s pain points and orchestrate the different lanes of work.
L5 - “tactical” In a normal software development environment, I would consider this a team lead and where I am. Whatever “workstream” I’m over, I should be able to gather requirements, come up with action items and estimates, schedule meetings, present proposed solutions, implement them or find the right people for help, document the implementation, work with the customer to teach them how to use it, support it, expand it, etc.
On smaller projects, if there is only one workstream. I’m often the only technical resource.
The customer knows the business outcomes and pain points. It’s up to me to design a solution.
L4 - they are expected to be able to gather requirements and understand the problem. But need help designing and implementing a solution.
From a soft skills standpoint, an L4 consultant could probably go toe to toe with an L6. From a system design standpoint, an L5 could go toe to toe with an L6 since we do actually do system design as part of our day to day work.
Now actual development skills and passing a coding interview is a different story.
