Onboarding

The first period in a new company is confusing. We get input from tons of sources. New colleagues to get to know, procedures to learn, papers to fill out, and so on.

Those weeks set the foundation on how the newly hired person will settle into company culture, learning by observation the company boundaries and roles.

After the first day of onboarding, there is a feeling of drunkenness from too much information. It can be useful to organize this information in form of artifacts that contains the main points with directions for where to learn more. The purpose of this map is to be able to be consumed by the freshly hired at their speed.

What exactly the company does

Onboarding is not only about the company but also about the industry. Once the more bureaucratic aspects are covered by the office manager, the focus can shift towards the map of business, product and stakeholders.

These concepts are lightly addressed during the interview phase, but once hired you can go to a greater level of detail without the confidentiality issues.

• revenue streams, how the company is making money
• goals in terms of team growth and revenue
• history of the collaboration with the customer and plans

Team dynamics

Scrum:

• in some cases, we may skip the academic explanation of the framework to focus more on the current implementation of the team
• is it useful to have a place for past team retrospectives. It may be difficult to grasp the problems addressed from outside, but it should transmit the openness value and willingness to continuously improve.

Release procedure:

• each team has its own, forged on experience and business needs
• PR review process
• how to bring your work in the production environment

AMS procedure:

• when things don't go as expected, it is useful to have guidelines on how to solve problems even from day one