Fresh eyes reports

In this article, you’ll learn how we, at Doctolib, manage to help our new joiners to be impactful as soon as they join us!

When joining most companies, it can be difficult to make a difference in the beginning: you have the product to discover, the stack to learn, all your new teammates to meet, and you feel like you still have a lot of things to prove before being in a position to have a relevant point.

At Doctolib, we are strong believers that good ideas can’t all come from the same brain, and we really appreciate a good reality check from time to time.

That’s why we ask our new joiners to write a fresh eyes report during their 45 first days at Doctolib.

What’s a Fresh Eyes Report?

It’s a simple list (no specific template or scope) of everything that surprises or impresses the new joiner. That impression being a good or bad one.

The whole point, for us, is to take the point of view of a person not yet accustomed to our ways, in order to challenge what we do and how we do it.

It’s an excellent way, for us, to get relevant feedback on things we take as granted because we live it every day.

For example, in Emmanuel Gautier’s fresh eyes report, we notice three things we could easily improve:

• Our technical mentoring program, Starsky & Hutch, was happening too late in the on boarding process of our new joiners, causing some mentoring sessions to be redundant with things the new joiner already sorted out by himself or with help of his teammates
• The schedule of the tech modules of the Doctolib Academy were stretched over weeks after the Doctolib Academy, causing some sessions to have already been covered while working on features.
• While setting up all tools, you end up sending something like five or six emails (for access requests) to our dedicated IT team. Which is tedious for the new joiner, and generates more tracking work for the IT team.

Ok, so now, you got feedback. What’s next?

Every fresh eyes report is read carefully and we try to identify relevant and impactful actions for things that we can improve. Not everything is changed at each new joiner remark, but we try to apply everything that has a good cost/value ratio.

Regarding Emmanuel’s report, we already did the following:

• We scheduled a Starsky & Hutch session during the course of our Doctolib Academy, in order for people to have a mentor as soon as possible.
• We started to investigate ways to organise a better tech modules organisation. It’s still a work in progress, but we are aware that there is room for improvement and we are working on it.
• And ultimately, we took all the IT requests needed for a new developer and packed them in a single email template containing all needed access requests (faster for the new joiner and the IT team!).

And that’s how we roll!

This way of considering feedbacks from people new to the organisation is coming from a strong belief:

What worked yesterday probably won’t work today. And what works today probably won’t work tomorrow.

We have to continuously assess the way we do things in order to detect what is no longer working and get even better at what we do!

That’s why humility is such an important value at Doctolib.

If you want more technical news, follow our journey through our docto-tech-life newsletter.