PM Case Study — Aboard
Aboard is an easy, centralized platform to plan and coordinate remote onboarding activities. This solution was created by aspiring PMs — Kajal Jain, Divya Dubey and Dhruv Balhara.
The Problem
When a new employee joins a company, their first few months set the tone for success for the company and the employee. A good onboarding experience can improve an employee’s long-term satisfaction, job performance and retention. Hence, hiring managers play a critical role in the success of every new hire.
In today’s remote work environment, a seamless onboarding process is a challenge for hiring managers, now more than ever. The entire process needs to be structured and requires harmonious coordination among all teams invovled in the onboarding process.
Lack of the two mentioned above can frustrate hiring managers, the back and forth of communication can lead to delays in onboarding, eventually result a poor experience for the new hire.
Though there are an abundance of existing HR softwares for onboarding, the onboarding is typicall a part of an extensive portfolio/suite of HR products. Most of these solutions for onboarding are built for HR teams, the primary users. Very few stand alone, as dedicated platforms for remote onboarding that solve the primary pain points of hiring managers and new hires.
Validate market demand & identify target users
To understand the pain point and market in this arena, we sent out surveys to new hires, hiring managers and HR teams to understand their recent experience on remote onboarding. The survey helped us identify the problems below:
- 35% of the new hires did not a have clear understanding of what was expected of them on their first day
- 43% of the respondents rated their remote onboarding experience a 3 or below on a scale of 1 to 5
- 71% of the respondents showed interest in trying out a potential solution for remote onboarding
We then interviewed 10 survey respondents, including hiring managers, who managed remote onboarding in the past 8 months and new hires. Below are some of the key insights we found out from these interviews:
“My biggest pain point is not knowing what to do, by when and whom to contact” (new hire)
“Remote onboarding lacks structure — just too many back and forths” (hiring manager)
“Biggest pain point is gathering all resources — there is no visibility on laptop shipment and delivery” (hiring manager)
The insights helped us define our primary user persona — hiring managers. Placing hiring managers at the center would help in streamlining internal remote onboarding processes, improving coordination among multiple onboarding teams and ensuring high engagement and satisfaction among new hires.
Product Strategy & Value Proposition
Based on our competitive research and user interviews, we discovered that there is a lack of structure in onboarding processes for startups and small companies. Most of the existing onboarding solutions are bundled with expensive HR suites and services either do not meet need of smaller companies or turn out to be a cost investment.
Hence, we decided to fill this gap in the solution space by focusing on startups and small-sized companies as our target customers.
Our intend is to design an easy & intuitive platform that makes flexible onboarding plans and effective coordination among onboarding teams. This platform would ensure high engagement among all stakeholders in the onboarding process, by keeping them updated with relevant information. The onboarding plan can be personalized for each new hire, with the ability to track shipments and status of tasks required to complete the oboarding process. Finally, the platform would be priced cost-effectively and provide the ability to integrate with existing HR suites to avoid any transfer costs.
Our initial strategic roadmap was created to provide a high-level view, outlining the key projects/experiments along with the estimated timelines.This was our most initial version and we kept updating it over time. For each product strategy, we defined 1–2 clear metrics to help us evaluate later if the strategy worked or not.
Our greatest challenge here was devising a differentiation strategy. We realized that thinking merely in terms of software features is not feasible as they can easily be imitated. We must adopt the mindset of prioritizing & focusing on resolving a particular pain point and measure our success on those terms.
How do we delight customers?
- Enabling them to onboard faster by decreasing time to productivity for the new hire
- Helping them avoid any training cost for the onboarding staff by making an intuitive & easy to use interface
- Helping them avoid high cost of investment of a full-feature HR suite by unbundling onboarding as a separate solution.
Early concept sketching and Validation
At this point, we moved from the problem space to initial ideation of our solution. Before our concept sketch, we identified the biggest paint points which we want to solve for and where we thought we can bring maximum value (using the Kano model). Following are the needs we aimed at addressing, and that are early concept sketches addressed:
- Lack of visibility in the ongoing onboarding process
- No centralized platform to smoothly coordinate onboarding tasks
- Limited synergy between multiple teams to create onboarding plan
This approach helped us align ourselves as a team in terms of how we think of the problem and develop perception of what a concept might look like. It formed a base to start initial user testing to validate our concept. We interviewed 6 hiring managers to gather initial thoughts and feedback.
A key learning for us here was being vulnerable — exposing rough and half baked ideas to our potential users and overcoming the fear of rejection. Another takeaway was avoiding any form of bias in the interviews by keeping it very conversational with open-ended questions.
Prototyping & User testing
By building a medium-fidelity interactive prototype, we were able to provide our closed group of users(hiring managers) with the first instance of user journey. This was the first time they could visually navigate the product that we had in mind by themselves. When conducting this user testing session, we focused on:
- Observing user’s behaviour on a particular screen and looking out for instances when they were either confused or stuck.
- Asking open ended questions such as — “what information are you hoping to find in the next screen once you click this button ?” and avoiding priming the user in any way.
This allowed us to validate if out interface was intuitive enough to not warrant a detailed & sophisticated user guide unlike most of our competitors. Had it not been for the fresh perspective provided by the user interviews, it was fairly easy for confirmation bias to creep in at this stage. It reminded us not to fall in love with our proposed solution but to fall in love with the problem instead.
A key insight we came across was from a user interview, where the user pointed out there was a redundant screen in the user’s journey as a hiring manager and the action of creating an onboarding plan could be done in fewer steps. This helped us simplify our interface even further.
Also, prototyping brought much needed clarity over the development effort required to build a particular user journey. This helped us plan our development efforts better in future weeks.
Define feature requirements — epics & user stories
After creating and validating our initial medium-fidelity prototype, we started defining requirements by first decomposing it into epics.
We defined high-level epics and their user stories to address key pain points.
1. Create onboarding plan
2. Full visibility of new hire’s onboarding plan and progress
3. Notifications for all teams to update their assigned tasks
Once the user stories were defined, we followed a simple impact vs effort prioritization framework to prioritize the most critical features.
Plan and build MVP
We planned to breakdown our MVP launch into 3 releases — focusing on the most critical user stories for Release 1.
In Release 1, the other onboarding teams (HR, IT) will have limited access to the main functionalities. The solution is primarily designed for the hiring manager to perform basic functionalities shown in the chart on the left.
A private beta group consisting of hiring managers will be formed prior to release. This group will be approached with the beta release of Release 1. This can play the role of a soft launch and would help in resolving any minor issues before a public release.
The 4 major aspects of the Release 1 launch that we will be looking at are :
- Creating onboarding template — to expedite onboarding process (major pain point)
- Visibility of onboarding plan — to coordinate and evaluate onboarding (major pain point)
- Dashboard home page — this page will tie together all user journeys and give hiring managers the ability to navigate the application.
- Landing page — this is where we show our product offerings and convince potential users to sign up with us.
Stay tuned for more updates as we build our MVP and share our learning as we go along.
