Tips and Tricks to build a large team - Part 2 (Onboarding)

What are the tips and tricks to build a large team in months? How do you get them organized, trained, and motivated to drive the outcomes when you are on a clock??

In the last post, we discussed how to rapidly hire many people when you are under pressure to execute a turnaround on a clock! In this post, we will discuss one of the most overlooked steps -?Onboarding.??

Onboarding, especially when recruiting a large number of people, is an important step that can set the tone, energize and motivate a new employee, and help the line managers drive productivity and outcomes faster.??

This process has been helpful in onsite, hybrid, or remote environments.

It is important to take a step back and consider how to prepare employees for success. Here are some ideas that can help new team members assimilate and improve their productivity.

For Technologists -

1. Explain the business -?Explain the business to your technologists. Technologists need to understand the customer, stakeholders, value chain, business sensitivities, key business metrics, and metrics relevant to their area of operation.
2. Create an onboarding plan by role?- Who should they meet? How can they learn about the business and their role in the customer's journey? Who are their stakeholders? Provide a face page with key executives and personnel. The hiring manager should be responsible for creating, maintaining, and training.
3. Assign an onboarding buddy. The Buddy can be the go-to person for answering questions. They can help introduce people to the business and organizational culture.
4. Introduce the product development team?- Introductions with product, design, and engineering teams, orientation on product development lifecycle, and sprint ceremonies.
5. Technical setup— Document technical environments, including entities and critical relationships, build deployment process, technical support procedure, on-call procedure, Github repositories, Unit testing, QA testing guidelines, knowledge of system interaction, scope of system interaction, pitfalls or areas to tread carefully. Introduce them to the subject matter experts and product operations counterparts.
6. Train on the Incident management process, including the escalation protocol, what to do when proactive alarms are received, troubleshooting tools, and access to observability tools.
7. Access to Data & analytic tools?- Introduce the product analytics tools in use, and active dashboards, self-service reports

For Product Managers -

1. Explain the business -?Help your product managers understand the customer, stakeholders, value chain, business sensitivities, key business metrics, and metrics relevant to their area of operation.
2. Understanding the customer?— Share research, personas (wants and needs), profiles, user research, customer calls, customer videos, and other customer research methods to get customer insights. Organize field trips as required. Help them understand the customer journey and internal journey.
3. Create an onboarding plan by role?- Who should they meet? How can they learn the business and their part in the customer's journey? Who are their stakeholders? Provide a face page with key executives and personnel. The hiring manager should be responsible for creating, maintaining, and training.
4. Assign an onboarding buddy?- Buddy can be a go-to person to answer questions. They can make introductions and assist in understanding business and organizational culture.
5. Introduce the product development team?- Introductions with product, design, and engineering teams, orientation on product development lifecycle, and sprint ceremonies.
6. Technical—Understand systems powering the value chain, the face page of technical/product leadership, testing procedures, the scope of system interaction, and pitfalls or areas to tread carefully. Introduce them to subject matter experts and product operations counterparts.
7. Intro to Data & Analytics Tools??- Introduce product analytics tools in use, active dashboards, and self-service reports.
8. Intro to Product Development Methodology?- Process, artifacts took kit, roles and responsibility matrix, access to user research, product documents, design guidelines, branding guidelines, product feature rollout process and guidelines

For UX and Design team members -?

1. Explain the business -?Your designers will drive value faster by understanding the customer, stakeholders, value chain, business sensitivities, key business metrics, and metrics relevant to their area of operation.
2. Explain the customer?- Share research, personas, profiles, user research, customer calls, customer video, and customer research methods to get customer insights. Organize field trips as required, customer journey, internal journey
3. Create an onboarding plan by role?- Who should they meet? How can they learn the business and their part in the customer's journey? Who are their stakeholders? Provide a face page with key executives and personnel. The hiring manager should be responsible for creating, maintaining, and training.
4. Assign an onboarding buddy?- Buddy can be a go-to person to answer questions. They can make introductions and assist in understanding business and organizational culture.
5. Product-oriented development: Introductions with product, design, and engineering teams, orientation on the product development lifecycle, and sprint ceremonies.
6. Access to Data & Analytics?- Introduce the product analytics tools in use, active dashboards, and self-service reports.
7. Introduce the Product Development Methodology?- Process, artifacts, design toolkit, design system, roles, and responsibility matrix, access to user research, product documents, design guidelines, branding guidelines, product feature rollout process, and guidelines.

These are some examples based on our experience that can help. This is by no means an exhaustive list. You should create a list that you think will help you onboard people faster. While these lists and documents are good, training your hiring manager to use them and follow the onboarding process is of paramount importance. The process will only work if the hiring manager is onboard. It is a good idea to make effective onboarding part of how you measure the hiring manager's performance.

Lastly, please make a point to send them a feedback form or survey a month after they start to get insights into whether your onboarding process is working. You cannot improve what you cannot measure. Review the score card results at the leadership level to ensure you have a good onboarding program and that it is driving the outcomes you expect.

I hope you find this helpful in quickly making your new hires part of the winning team and driving better engagement.

#productengineering #productmanagement #UI/UX #product-development