🐣 Onboarding a New Hire
Keep the team fully formed to ensure high performance and maximum productivity. Consider challenges and stumbling blocks a new hire can face and provide enough flexibility, instrumentation, and knowledgebase to overcome those obstacles during the phase of joining a new team.
Product Vision
Repeatable Onboarding Process
Step 1 - Intro call
During the intro call we cover Product Vision and an overview of the Onboarding process. Explain new team member where to find information (in this playbook).
Step 2 - Ways of Working
A high-level overview of the Ways of Working, Slack etiquette.
Step 3 - SDLC
Share the SDLC with new hire, so that you can align new team member to your software development lifecycle. It should include items like: where to take tickets from? How to name branches? How to pass tickets further? and many more.
Step 4 - Onboarding Buddy
Create a shared Slack channel with a few experienced team members that support a new hire as their Top priority item.
Step 5 - Setup Dev Environment
Provide instructions and free time for new hire to get up to speed with a codebase and set up the development environment asynchronously.
Step 6 - Architecture Overview
Overview of the Architecture, Technical Approach and CI/CD pipelines.
Architecture
Tech Approach
Step 7 - Prepare for your first Daily standup
This is a perfect opportunity to say a few words about a new hire and introduce them to a team. Make sure to do a roundtable and let everyone introduce themselves.
Step 8 - Your Goals for the first 6 weeks
A brief reminder about your Onboarding goals from Step 1.
Step 9 - Impact and Influence Expectations
Ensure you have a common understanding with a new hire about expectations from his/her role.
Step 10 - Pick-up first ticket for development
Find beginner-friendly, straightforward and non-urgent tasks for a new hire to work on.
Step 11 - Improve the Onboarding process or documentation
As a rule of thumb, every new hire must improve the onboarding process. Depending on the maturity level of the team and new hire this improvement can go from writing a script to automate a manual task, updating onboarding documentation to suggesting a whole new way to onboard 🥲.
Make new hires say: "Wow!" (in a good way!) on their first day! 😬
When you follow the "Onboarding New Hire" playbook, you can expect:
Efficient Onboarding that gives New Hire way to achieve quick wins and keep high pace of getting to know your stuff
Higher level of engagement from new hire due to predictable and transparent onboarding program
Foundation for Continuously updated by new hires Onboarding program (self-organizing team)