How we improved the engineer onboarding process at Alan
At Alan, we have a well-defined onboarding in place. Our culture puts a strong emphasis on asynchronous work, which is crucial for our “work from anywhere” policy; many of our colleagues work remotely. Therefore, it’s very important that the newcomer feels surrounded, and finds all the information they need for their first weeks.
For that, the newcomer is assigned two engineers: a “role-buddy” and a coach. The role-buddy will assist them on anything technical and help them get acquainted with the day-to-day events of an engineer at Alan. The coach, a more senior engineer, will follow their progress and help them grow as an engineer.
In their first weeks, the new engineer will: read documentation, attend in-person training sessions on various technical topics, and join different teams (product focus teams) to work with them — what we call the Woodchuck program.
You can find more about onboarding in this blog post.
This process worked well, but we found things to improve.
We had a bottleneck issue
Our Head of Engineering was the one made aware of future arrivals, and in charge of picking a coach and a role-buddy for the newcomer in advance of their starting date. This allowed both of them to get ready for their new role and prepare everything needed. As there was no specific timeline to do this, the engineers assigned would find out about it at the last minute. Also, no one else was aware of an upcoming arrival, which prevented engineers from being proactive about it. Additionally, it created a mental load on the Human Resources department who was waiting to add this info in their HR tools.
Incomplete Feedback loop
In the 4th week, newcomers are asked to fill out a survey regarding the onboarding. This survey is the same for every new Alaner, and is dedicated to the general onboarding experience with a focus on the in-person training sessions. This left some blind spots regarding the specificities of the engineering onboarding. In addition, this survey is the responsibility of the Human Resources department, and there is no process in place to share engineering-specific feedback.
As part of the onboarding, newcomers have frequent check-ins with their role-buddy to talk about how everything is going. However, the process could be improved both to gather feedback about the specificities of the engineering onboarding, and to make sure the feedback was followed up by some actions.
Unclear ownership
Informal feedback and discussions among engineers surfaced that there was unclear or inappropriate ownership: Head of Engineering had competing priorities, HR was not concerned by the engineering onboarding per se, and nobody in engineering was responsible for a consistent Woodchuck experience.
The Eng Onboarding Team
At Alan, distributed ownership is one of our core principles: anyone can own initiatives, without intervention from a manager. Another core principle is “Alaners edit the company”; if we believe something needs fixing, we fix it!
That’s how two engineers, who recently joined and felt concerned by this topic, decided to join forces and create a team dedicated to improving this onboarding. They also took ownership of some processes where it was not clear or not adapted, and clarified it for others — like staffing newcomers in their first team.
Automation!
To make sure that this new ownership didn’t put too much weight on their workload, one of the first things the team did was to automate a lot of actions previously done by hand. This included implementing Slack bots and setting up monitoring alerts. It started during a hackaton organized at Alan which had the theme “Alaners simplify”.
- A pool of available role-buddies and coaches was created
- The role-buddy and coach selection was automated via a Slack bot: 2 weeks before the newcomer’s arrival, the engineering team is notified via an automated message that picks engineers from the pool. They can accept, or decline and it will find someone else.
- Addition/removal from the pool was automated too: engineers can type a command in Slack to be added to the pool or removed, or see their status
- An alert was set up to warn the Engineering Onboarding team in case there are less than 3 engineers in the role-buddy pool
- Another one was set to warn the Engineering Onboarding team 3 weeks ahead of a newcomer’s arrival. This allows them to keep an eye on the automated process and keep track of the still-manual tasks. They take care of posting a message introducing the newcomer to the team ahead of their arrival, and making sure some engineers will plan to have a chat with them.
Improving the feedback loop
The team put in place the Fresh-Eyes report, adapted from Doctolib. It started experimentally and then was definitely adopted after a few months. Fun fact: the first newcomer to ever fill one out is now part of the Engineering Onboarding Team 😀
This is how it’s presented to the newcomer:
More importantly, it serves as support material for a debrief session with someone from the Engineering Onboarding Team so that feedback doesn’t get lost and practical actions can be taken!
More clarity and consistency
Documentation was created or improved, and shared to the team. For instance, the one on the Woodchuck period was entirely revamped so that every engineer welcoming a newcomer in their team knows what’s expected from them.
Results and following steps
The changes put in place allowed to make the experience more consistent, while both clarifying ownership and decreasing mental load. What better way to show it than some recent newcomers’ feedback?
“I would like first to congratulate all the Alaners who worked on the documentation, the knowledge management and the builders of this onboarding that I find very pleasant and complete.”
“The first [part] will focus mainly on my feedback about the onboarding process in itself. Spoiler alert, the process doesn’t have anything to envy to the ones of the big tech companies I’ve been at. The things mentioned there are really small suggestions to make it even better than it is already.”
The Engineering Onboarding team completed its mission ✅ It now continues to exist in run mode — we don’t plan to build new features. And it is now the official owner of the Engineering onboarding process. If you want to discover it, just apply 😉
