photo credit: opensourceway

Developer Team Onboarding Playbook

I’m working on building out a plan to improve our engineering onboarding at Offgrid Electric. As we start to add engineers to the team at a faster pace, the cost of not getting onboarding right increases. I’m sure the playbook is slightly different from team to team, and I think it is important to note that I am developing this playbook with a distributed team in mind.

I reached out to some mentors, past & current teammates, & twitter to develop a plan. I would love further suggestions, if you feel I am missing something or breaking Rule One of Management: First, Do No Harm.

This is my current draft on building out an onboarding playbook:

• Have a home for onboarding plans, checklists, & materials
  • different pieces in git, wiki, or project management software
  • execute / improve against playbook with each hire
  • plans are available to everyone including the new hires to help improve
• Checklists
  • accounts to be setup (and who is responsible for setting them up)
  • email lists, groups, permissions to be granted (and who is responsible for setting them up)
  • things that need to happen in the first day, first week, first month
• Send welcome / Team Introduction email
• Assign a team buddy
  • helps answer questions on company, process, code, & culture
  • partner for first staging deployment
  • partner for first production deployment
  • many teams make use of a buddy, the concept is covered well in, Make New Teammates Feel Welcome from the Start, of Zapier’s guide to remote work.
• Day one plan
  • 1-1 with hiring manager, verify basic accounts setup together
  • get on team communication tools (Slack, Asana, etc)
  • git commit to documentation
  • time to install dev tools
  • 1-1 with buddy
• Initial getting started on the project
  • Follow project setup instructions, sending PRs for any missing, dated, or confusing information along the way
  • tests passing
  • development server success
  • mobile app builds (mobile devs)
  • mobile app can connect to dev server (mobile devs)
• Initial smaller quick win tickets for the first week(s)
• Intro Getting Started Pairing Schedule
  • a small number of schedule pairing events in the first few weeks
  • scheduled pairing time with buddy
  • scheduled pairing time with team mates, help with knowledge sharing and getting to know folks
• Schedule initial check-ins
  • with team lead 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months
  • with buddy
  • with business partners (if sensible)
  • with other key players (QA, etc)
• Scheduled items should be added to new dev’s calendar

Thanks @mariagutierrez, @glv, @tempo, @sonia_pdx, & @davetron5000 for ideas and inspiration.

If you have ideas, please share in the comments or hit me up on twitter @danmayer