Your playbook to onboard well on a new team
How should you go about onboarding to a new team? What tactics make sense. I help break down all this and more in a 6 week journey.
We have tons of advice on how to prepare well for interviews, how to succeed in an interview, negotiate your salary etc and get that job that you seek.
But …
What about when you finally join the company?
How do you ensure you land well in your new role and put yourself in a position to succeed?
I feel this topic has not gotten much love ❤️, and I hope to change that a little bit with this blog.
With many companies offering remote positions, I’ve found assimilating and onboarding well as a new team member is quite an art in itself. Many new employees struggle in this phase especially given that expectations from managers have increased.
I’ve worked at 7 different companies over my 14+ years of career in Software engineering and have onboarded onto multiple teams and companies of different scale. During my early career years, I mostly went with the natural flow and the vibe, but over the years I’ve refined a method out of the madness and learned a thing or two about certain practices that are quite helpful while onboarding.
Let’s get into those.
Disclaimer and caveat: I will structure this in terms of loose timeline ranges of 1st week, 2-3, 4-6 weeks etc. These are just there to give you some mental hooks around how to frame your onboarding journey in your mind, depending on your context it may take longer or shorter.
For example, If you are a senior engineer tasked with a complex cross functional problem from the get go, it may take longer. Please don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself to go faster etc. It does not help.
Do what comes naturally to you, but acknowledge the fact that any manager generally expects a new hire to be productive and fairly independent in ~ 3 months (give or take) from the date of joining. For any exceptional cases, please align with your manager.
Your 1st week ☺️
Setup your fundamentals, meet people and leaders
There are two common scenarios when it comes to onboarding on a new team
You are a new employee to the company
You are a seasoned employee, but are onboarding on to a new team in either the same org or different org.
For this blog, I’m mostly adopting the persona of a new employee to the company as that I feel is more challenging, but the approaches and practices mentioned here remain quite similar.
Setup your basics 🐘
Let’s start with the the fundamentals, during your first week
Get your work equipment (laptop, phone), swag etc
Install tools and software required for day to day working
Sort out admin stuff like your documentation, setup payroll
Attend orientation from HR team and other peers/leaders
Meet and greet with people on the team and cross functional areas etc.
The first week is always exciting with tons of things going on and the best advice I can give at this stage is to focus on setting up these fundamentals well.
Don’t be in a hurry to onboard just yet. Take your time to understand the environment you are in first.
General onboarding mindset and approach 🦘
Below are a few tactical things you can do right away.
Don’t be lazy. Take notes
Please don’t rely on your memory to help you take in all sorts of random facts, procedures or context about your team/org/environment. Our brains are meant for higher order thinking and remembering all the details is not particularly your brains strong suit.
How should one take notes?
The simplest advice I can give is to go with whatever medium you are most comfortable with. Paper notes more your thing? Good, take those.
If you ask me personally, You should use a cloud drive with docs that can be easily accessed and modified or even markdown plain text notes
Ask questions and be curious
If you don’t understand something yet, don’t keep quiet. Ask clarifying questions to understand context better. Being silent when you are new on the team does not work in your favor, as it leaves everyone wondering if you actually are getting what’s being discussed.
Here is the secret, when you are so new, no one expects much from you, utilize the newbie hat and ask questions, also take the effort to note down the answers and resources shared by others and offer to update the onboarding docs FAQ sections. This is such a low hanging fruit, that I’m often surprised that more people don’t do this.
Your team will thank you since you took the time to do something no one likes to do; write good docs.
Speak to your manager and senior engineers on the team
You should have a 1:1 with your direct manager and a few senior engineers on the team who you may be working with.
Please don’t focus only on pleasantries but ask them:
What do they work on? Their history, journey on the team.
What are their biggest pain points?
What are the current goals the team or org is working towards?
What is a low hanging fruit they wish someone can help them with?
Who should you talk to next?
These are some example topics you can get into, you should have a sense of what people on your team work on and start peacing the parts of the puzzle.