Tour de Convoy

Our Unique Approach to Onboarding Engineers in Hyper-Growth

Engineering onboarding is a fickle beast. Each developer who joins a new company has particular expectations for their first day/month/year based on prior experiences, which makes finding a perfect solution pretty tough (read: impossible). But perfection isn’t what you strive for when building out an onboarding program; it’s crafting a system that teaches, stretches, and supports new hires, while also adapting to your team’s growth and needs.

Some companies have huge teams dedicated to perfecting their new hire ramp-up, others have just a few folks, and some don’t have the resources to dedicate anyone at all. When I joined Convoy in December of 2018, our engineering onboarding fell into that last category. At that time, a few passionate engineers were using their free time to create some semblance of onboarding structure. They wanted something unique that worked to solve the pain points they were starting to notice due to the organization’s new (and exciting!) hyper-growth — they were fearful that an influx of engineers would cause teams to become siloed, despite the necessary cross-team collaboration that’s crucial to our business’s success.

While the more tenured engineers knew folks on other teams (and what those teams worked on), they could only act as connectors for new hires for so long. Other teams would grow as well, and that cross-pollination would likely become harder to achieve. The most effective way to fix this before it became at all pervasive was to start with new hires — if they could come in on day 1 and immediately start building a knowledge base of different teams, technologies, and people, we could instill an org-wide culture that actively invests in exposure and collaboration.

Our First Lap

So with a lot of work and a little bit of imaginative titling, the Tour de Convoy was created. The idea was relatively simple: expose new engineers to a couple teams before they join their “official” team (about a 5-week-long endeavor). Within these first 5 weeks, the new hire sprints on 2 different teams, working on well-scoped (and impactful) projects. We curate the new hire’s Tour teams based on their skills and interests (sussed out from interviews and conversations during the closing process). The Tour effectively gives new hires the opportunity to meet various managers, learn how each team’s projects intertwine (along with the technologies that make those projects possible), and understand how the individual team goals funnel into the broader company goals. Meanwhile, the teams get fresh eyes on their projects and processes. The Tourist is an extra, temporary resource for those two weeks, often allowing teams to more quickly meet their goals.

If we take a step back and look at our recruiting strategy, it’s important to note that at Convoy, engineers are hired into general “software engineer” roles, not tied to any specific team. For the majority of our candidates, this (paired with the Tour de Convoy) is a huge selling point because they’re able to test the waters before committing to a certain team or project — they simply get to experience Convoy Engineering as a broader entity. For us, it means that we don’t need to conduct team-specific interviews, both spreading out our engineers’ interview load while also allowing folks on multiple teams to meet a prospective new hire. We simply get to see developers as developers, objectively, not pigeon-holed as potential members of X or Y team.

Beyond the Tour, the rest of our new hires’ onboarding experience is bolstered by an impressive number of courses offered within their first weeks and months at Convoy. We provide classes such as Intro to GraphQL, The Lifecycle of a Convoy Shipment, Operational Tools Onboarding, Convoy’s Product Vision, and many more. These courses provide deep dives into specific technologies, teams, and processes — and because we don’t hire people under the expectation that they’re a trucking industry expert, we also offer a number of trucking-specific overviews and resources. We never wanted or planned for the Tour to be the only option for our new engineers — folks learn best in different ways and at different paces, so providing a holistic onboarding experience that is customizable and adapts to the individual is what works best for us at this stage of the company.

Rounding the Bend

As an engineer approaches the final week of their Tour, they attend an in-person check-in (with me!) to reflect on their onboarding experience. I find it incredibly beneficial to have these meetings because I’m able to better understand where we can improve the program and, more importantly, how we can further support this new hire. I also spend this time reiterating how the team placement meeting works. Unlike other rotational onboarding programs (think: Facebook’s Bootcamp), the new hire does not have an explicit choice of team once they’ve completed their Tour; the program’s purpose is exposure. We make this clear before and after they’ve arrived, but it’s especially important to reiterate it before their team placement meeting, which takes place in the middle of the fifth and final week of their Tour. In this meeting, the new hire meets with one of our engineering directors to determine which team they’ll call home. The decision is made based on three factors:

1. Their strengths/background
2. Our business needs
3. Their interests/goals

Their official placement can be with one of the teams on which they’ve already sprinted, or it can be with a completely new team (because we’re a fast-moving startup, team needs can sometimes adjust from month-to-month, so we need to be prepared for either outcome). If it’s the latter placement, we make sure the new hire meets with the manager before team selection is finalized.

Ideally when an engineer exits their Tour de Convoy, they’ll be better equipped to contribute to their official team due to the broader context they now have. Additionally, they’ve accumulated a number of contacts across the org (and company) to help them better execute on their tasks, thus attenuating team siloing. Engineers now feel comfortable (and empowered) to chat with someone on another team because it’s become the “norm” for them. Oftentimes (especially at big or rapidly growing companies), there’s an inherent worry or self consciousness around contacting someone in a different org. What if they’re too busy? What if they don’t see the value in my question? What if they never respond (or respond negatively)? By the end of the Tour, any semblance of this worry is eradicated because we’ve actively worked to showcase the importance of making these connections, and it’s now engrained in Convoy’s culture.

Bumps in the Road

While the positives are clear, I fully acknowledge the risks associated with the rotational onboarding model (especially at a startup with limited resources); just the sheer amount of coordination involved to prep for incoming engineers is enough to scare anyone away. Because most of the industry hires for specific teams, some folks enter our recruiting process skeptically. They want to make a connection with one team throughout the interview process; they want to chat about interesting projects with their [potential] manager and have lunch with a few team members to see how they gel. It is — understandably — a risk to interview for a generalist role. However, we do our best to make Convoy feel comfortable and welcoming by inviting candidates to coffee, lunch, and team events. We believe that meeting a diverse set of Convoy engineers throughout the interview process is beneficial, and mirrors the Tour’s philosophy that engaging with multiple folks across a handful of teams is crucial to the health of our org.

A related risk is the fact that sometimes the Tour can feel as though you’re in a constant state of flux. You start to feel comfortable on your first team midway through your second week, just to be uprooted and placed on another team a few days later. This can be viewed as essentially onboarding three separate times. Therefore, it’s important to note that the Tour is optional. Before someone starts, we outline what the Tour is, what it is not, that it’s not for everyone, and that it’s absolutely okay to opt out. While our opt-in rate is almost 90%, for some folks the concept of touring is chaotic or overwhelming; those engineers are generally better suited to joining their official team right off the bat. When someone opts out, they chat with one of our engineering directors to determine the appropriate team placement for their skills and interests. For new grads, we don’t expect the Tour de Convoy to be fully supportive of someone with minimal industry experience, so we have them ramp up on and connect with one team straightaway. This allows us to better plan around which teams have the most ideal mentoring capabilities, ensuring that the new grad has a strong foundation on which to learn and grow.

A final — yet rare– risk is that we simply choose the wrong team for the Tourist during their team placement process. As much as we try to gather and understand the new hire’s interests, goals, and strengths throughout their Tour, sometimes we miss the mark when pairing them to a team. Our first priority is making sure our new hires feel excited about and comfortable with their official placement, so when that’s not the case, we work with the engineer to course-correct (whether that’s being more hands-on in the integration process or choosing a different team altogether).

Paving the Way

While noting where the Tour de Convoy might fall short, we must also recognize that these pain points are diluted when you have a leadership team that sees its value and are fully leaned in to making it work and work well. This program can’t exist without the entire engineering org actively investing in our new hires and ensuring they’re receiving the right level of support. Because of this, folks are generous with their praise of the program — here are a few relevant quotes we’ve collected over the past few months:

“[The Tour] was one of the factors that attracted me to Convoy.”

“My team gets so excited when a Tourist sprints with us — it’s like a breath of fresh air!”

“The project I worked on with my first team thoroughly helped me succeed on my second team — I don’t know how I would’ve gotten that context without the Tour.”

Additionally, at Convoy we’ve developed a great culture around feedback. Our new hires are given numerous opportunities to submit suggestions for how we can improve the Tour and our onboarding process in general (through both surveys and in-person check-ins). We take this feedback seriously, look for trends, and implement changes rapidly.

We’ve learned a lot since the birth of the Tour in October 2018 while making plenty of changes. To name a few, we’ve:

• Decreased the Tour from 3 sprints to 2 (this was the very first version of the Tour, but that final sprint didn’t add enough ROI to warrant keeping it — plus, waiting until week 8 to land on your official team made folks antsy)
• Introduced dedicated Onboarding Mentors to support new engineers throughout the entirety of their Tour (providing a stable, guiding force to reduce feelings of confusion or aimlessness)
• Created pre-onboarding materials like team bios, FAQs, and learning styles surveys (feeling prepared on your first day lessens some of those new job jitters)

We hope to never get stuck in an onboarding rut or lose focus on what we’re trying to achieve with our ramp-up strategy.

There’s no one-size-fits-all model for onboarding, particularly when it comes to engineering, and especially when it comes to trucking. At Convoy, we’re constantly working to reassess, improve, and implement changes to our onboarding programs. While I personally focus on engineering and how we can build more ramp-up options for different learning styles and experience levels, we also have people across the company actively working to make Convoy feel small and trucking feel accessible through trainings, AMAs, and workshops. In keeping with our high standards of innovation, we’ll continue to assess and adapt our onboarding in the future, but as an early stage startup in hyper-growth, the Tour de Convoy perfectly meets our needs.

If you would like to learn more about Convoy or embark on the Tour yourself, please check out our Product & Engineering page. Thanks for reading!