How to onboard yourself as a digital product engineer

As an Engineering Manager from Digital product & Services SBU — Evermos, I would like to share a bit about what I expected from a new engineer in my department (non-fresh graduate/junior). Hopefully, this article also help you to adapt to the team and pass your probation period 🤞.

To improve the readability, I want to split this short article into three sections based on the probation period i.e 1, 2, and 3 months.

First Month

Understanding the goal of probation, As already most employees know probation is the critical period between employees and the company or department itself. The goal of probation is to discover and asses fitness, as a new joiner probably you will discover and assess the work balance and culture fit.

On another side, as an EM I would like to discover and asses if you already became a missing puzzle in my team. I expect you able to fulfill what the team needs based on your capability. Delivering the feature based on the department roadmap is always the first department priority.

Three things you must have in your first month period,

1. For the working device, the GA department will give you a Macbook pro device, please make sure the device is good enough, in the first month I would expect you already successfully installed all the tools and software that you need.
2. The onboarding journal contains several checklists to understand the systems, processes, and procedures, also the culture in the Evermos engineering team. I would not expect you to remember all of that things 🙈, but I hope you finish all 1 on 1 session checklists in your first month of the period
3. Learning offering, the document will help you to understand the roles in the department, product knowledge, department goal or OKR, and also what kind of access you need. Please make sure in the first month you already know where the place (i.e repo) and get access i.e VPN.
4. Onboarding buddy, to assist you from a technical perspective you will be helped by your onboarding buddy. You need to understand the codebase code architecture and contribution guidelines from your engineering buddy

last but not least I would like to expect you already pickup good first issue 😃. A good first issue is a low-priority and severity task that will help you to understand the codebase, the good first issue maybe not contains so much product knowledge.

Second Month

After the first month, you will get a 1 month probation score, it’s the first time in the probation review process. if you get a probation score then a minimum score (I hope not 😭), don’t worry we still have time to improve together in the next 2 months. So, here is what I would expect from you in your second month:

1. Contributing to a simple feature, this feature requires 50% product knowledge to work, you need to learn how digital product architecture flows, such as integration with partner, SNS, event-alert, etc.
2. You can work as an on-call engineer, working on critical issues or defects.
3. Starting to review a PR, reviewing a PR is one way to distribute the knowledge across engineers
4. Understanding the team and goal OKR, and having the initiative to help the team achieve the OKR.
5. Set a regular meeting 1 on 1 meeting with a teammate, tech lead, and engineering manager.

Third Month

It’s the last month of your probation review, to complete your probation period and get a high score 🚀, these are what I expect from you

1. Contribution to a complex feature requires you to understand 75 % of product knowledge, and also requires cross-department communication such as payment, authentication, etc.
2. Creating a TRD (technical requirement document) and doing a task breakdown.
3. Actively doing a review PR on your teammate’s PR. I expect you set dedicate time each day to spend your time in PR reviewing process
4. Doing a shared knowledge department internally or platform internally, you could share new knowledge via sharing knowledge events, medium articles, or share cool links in slack.

Finally, this expectation list could be my only point of view, but if you are assigned to the same department as me, I hope this article helps you to understand my expectation and working in the team 😄.