Onboarding a Small Team (with a focus on Product Design)
Hi. Hello. Hoi. My name is Simone, and I am one of the Product Designers at Frontify.
First impressions count, and perhaps never more so than when joining a new workplace. You may think that your team is too small to think about onboarding, but a little effort can go a really long way.
Let me preface by saying that by no means am I a writer (this is why I became a designer after all), and I haven’t ‘formally’ been trained in anything related to onboarding. What I do know, however, is how I felt whenever I joined a new workplace, and how these first impressions and efforts (the good, the bad, and the ugly) paved the way for my experience at those respective places.
Frontify has delivered the best onboarding I’ve ever been a part of, even though it wasn’t specifically geared to the team I was joining but rather a company-wide experience. I didn’t, however, mind because my team had only three members before I joined, and it was B.C. (Before Covid) so I could easily (and regularly) ask my colleagues face-to-face questions whenever one arose. I was even assigned a buddy, Johänna, who helped me ease into my first months on the job.
Getting Started
Even though my start was easy, what works for a team of four isn’t going to work forever. With another new designer joining soon, and more to come later in the year, I took a little time to think about what might help new people settle in.
First of all, I had to consider that our close-knit, small group communication wasn’t sustainable, especially with a transition to a partially remote culture at Frontify. So far, our entire team has been based in Switzerland, but I had to consider that this wouldn’t always be the case.
It was therefore a combination of my past experiences and the consideration for how the future of the company may be that defined my checklist of must-haves for our Product Designer onboarding.
To communicate and document the onboarding in an effective way, I turned to Frontify and Pitch, and I included the following topics:
- Who Are Your Teammates?
- Slack Channels Worth Looking At (Communication channels)
- Tools & Resources we use
- Our Design (& Iteration) Process(es)
- Rituals & Culture
- Our Buddy System
So let’s look into the details of each one and why I decided to include them in the Product Designer onboarding.
Who Are Your Teammates?
The reason for including this one I feel is pretty obvious, but it hasn’t been included in any onboarding I’ve been a part of so far (probably because my past employers were either not remote, or just didn’t have an onboarding).
I gave each of us (the team) our own Pitch slide to introduce ourselves, and made sure to include:
- Our very nice corporate portraits
- Our name (and nickname)
- Three ‘true (non-work-related) facts’ about ourselves
These introductions aim to really break the ice for our newcomer by saying, “See, look how approachable and fun we are! Right? Right!”
Slack Channels Worth Looking At
Next, we want to make sure our new teammate knows where/how all the #coolkids are communicating (and where we sometimes even keep up to date with work), which is often with Slack. To make this huge chunk of information digestible, I used three slides and divided the channels into three respective categories: need-to-join, probably-should-join, and want-to-join, as illustrated below:
- Product Design Team Channels (As ‘one of us’ you have to join these)
This slide details all of the channels integral to keeping up to date with relevant internal product news/updates/discussion, employee success news, and weekly Company Update information. - Really Worth Joining (For a good overview of Frontify)
Here we have all of the informative and/or entertaining Fronti-channels that most of the people at Frontify are part of as well. They include (but are not limited to): #random, #general, and #chäschuechli (the Swiss-German word for cheesecake). - Fun & Cool to Join (Don’t let FOMO get the best of you!)
These channels are as the name suggests, and only some people join each of these if they wish to. I chose to include a nice cross-section of available channels to show that we support a community that is interested in a wide range of different activities and topics, such as: #frontiletics, #pets-of-frontify, #diversify, and #game-cave
Tools and Resources We Use
The general Company onboarding (for all new employees) covers a lot of the tools we use, such as Slack and Loom but, alas, we Product Designers have to learn and use a lot more than that. In this section, I outline everything that we use and include links to the software when needed for easy access. This gives our newbie(s) an overview of everything that they need in order to work seamlessly at Frontify.
Our Design (& Iteration) Process(es)
Now that our newest team member knows the ins and outs of Slack and their software stack, we can move onto how we work with all of this.
Currently, we’re in interdisciplinary teams (1 Product Manager, 1 Product Designer, and 2–4 Engineers) that are built around OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), and each team focuses on one objective. We opted to use OKRs because it allows us to better distribute knowledge between people, effectively making us experts in particular areas of the platform.
At this part of the onboarding, it’s important for us to let our new teammates know that they have a lot of freedom within their team structure to let them be efficient (and comfortable) doing what they do best.
If they don’t feel so comfortable with all of this freedom and want some guidance on what is needed for a product team to become successful, we have also defined so-called Work Packages. Work Packages are informative lists that should help the teams to define who is driving and who is responsible for each objective whilst making sure that nothing falls ‘under the table.’
Rituals & Culture
Frontify has a really great culture (our team especially, if I do say so myself), which prides itself on trusting its employees to be in charge of their own autonomy. In other words, “We trust you to utilize your time as you please as long as you get the job done because you’re a human being and should have a healthy work-life balance.” I really wanted to communicate this trust and freedom in the onboarding, because it’s awesome to know how you’ll be treated by everyone here — both on a professional and personal level.
Here I also outlined a few values in Product Design that we hold very dearly, such as ‘transparency’ and ‘honest feedback on our work’ (sugarcoat-free-zone, pls). I have also dedicated a whole slide to letting our newest teammate know that we’re all nerds that love regular game nights (lately it has been fortnightly virtual D&D nights, which has an article of its own here). Essentially, this section really reinforces that we all work proactively and honestly, and have a bunch of lols along the way.
Our Buddy System
Last but not least, the Frontify Buddy System. I really valued having Johänna as my buddy and felt she really helped me to settle in and ‘get the ball rolling,’ so of course, I wanted to continue this tradition for all future onboardings! Plus, in addition to having all of this information documented and shared in Frontify and Pitch, it’s sometimes nice to just have face-to-face feedback instead, or even just a chat to touch base. In turn, when another person starts on our team, we can alternate who carries the baton and be the next buddy for them (and so the onboarding cycle continues).
