Welcome to the team!

Onboarding new team members

When growing your team, make sure everyone is set up for success

Hi! We are Nicolas Backal and Katie Le, product designer and product manager at Okta. We have been working together for years, and we want to share the lessons we’ve learned through the lens of a cookbook with detailed recipes for creating a great design-product partnership.

For the past year, Katie and I have been working together co-owning a couple of scrum teams. We constantly collaborate with our engineering partners and seek constant feedback from other product managers and designers, but the day-to-day work usually comes down to us two. This has worked well since we have created a shared process, and after working together for years, our workstream runs fast and smoothly.

Recently we were presented with the exciting opportunity to co-lead a new business initiative. This means more responsibility and the opportunity to launch a new product to the market. But like any new project, it comes with challenges, like realizing early on that we were not going to succeed on our own. We needed to build a team, and we needed to do it fast. We had a lot of help with recruiting (thankfully!), but as soon as a new team member joined, a plan was needed to get them started and set up for success.

Create a plan to onboard new members to your team

Before starting any task, make sure everyone on your team, but in particular new members, has a clear understanding of the project’s vision, any existing foundation work they should know about, and has access to the necessary resources to succeed.

Create and share a project vision

Imagine you join a team that is building a new transportation vehicle, and as your first task, you are asked to design the steering wheel. Without context, any attempts will likely end in constant failures. How many tires does it have? Does it fly, or does it float? It would help if you had an overview of the project, understand the shared vision, and know how parts connect to successfully design your piece. This is true for almost every project.

In our case, we started by creating a moon-shot prototype that showed the project’s goals at a high level. We made sure to keep it at a vision level and avoid focusing on too much detail. The goal was to show new team members how the whole machine was supposed to work but still keep the details open-ended before splitting our tasks into pieces.

Finding the time to do this when your hands are full can be a challenge on its own, but your new team members will appreciate it since it will allow them to start driving sooner and in the right direction.

Map any existing products that will act as the foundation for the new initiative

Our new project is going to be based on functionality that we support on an existing product. Once the first new members joined our team, I assumed we all understood the existing functionality the same way, but that was not the case. It quickly became evident that without a shared understanding of existing architecture and constraints, we were not going to succeed individually or as a team.

We decided to take a step back and invest time building materials that highlighted the essential components of our existing product. Once we had this, we blocked time to review it a couple of times and continued doing so until we all understood the foundation needed for the new project. At first, this may seem like a waste of time. Why would you spend resources documenting an existing product? But in the long run, it allowed the team (particularly new team members) to design faster while building on existing architecture.

Create an onboarding document and keep it updated

When joining a new team is crucial to meet the relevant stakeholders and understand the team’s culture and processes. This has become even harder with the shift towards remote work since it is more complicated than ever to meet everyone on your team and know where to find the needed resources.

Katie had the great idea to create an onboarding document that we would share with any new colleague that joined our team, regardless of their job or profession. Think about it as a hub or home base, where all the crucial links and stakeholders are listed to help you get started.

This short hub contains a list of relevant stakeholder responsibilities and how to reach them. We included a section with our culture, where we talk about important meetings, communication channels, and collaboration tools. Lastly, we added links to all the essential documents and libraries someone should have access to get started.

Keep in mind that this document is and should be an evolving process. People leave, and others join. New documents are created while others become irrelevant, so it’s crucial to keep them updated.

Bonus: Invite new team members to relevant channels and meetings

Adding new team members to relevant communication channels and meetings sounds obvious, but failing to do so promptly can delay progress in a significant way. At the same time, adding new hires to all meetings and comms can feel overwhelming, so try to focus on the most important one that will help them get started. Do you have a weekly planning meeting? Is there a demo day? Do you have an overall team channel where high-level topics are discussed?

We created a list with channels and meetings to keep on hand for whenever a new team member joins, and we make it a point to welcome them warmly when they attend a meeting for the first time.

Ingredients

1. A prototyping tool to create a vision demo. We used Figma, but other great resources include Sketch or Adobe XD. Depending on your project, you may use a low fidelity prototyping tool like pen and paper. As long as the story is clear, you should be good to go.
2. A recording software that allows videos to be shared easily. Once we had the vision prototype ready, we recorded ourselves walking through it and shared the link with the team. This made it easier for all of us to access whenever we need a vision refresher quickly. We used Loom, but QuickTime or any other recording tool will do.
3. A diagramming tool. For our existing architecture mapping, we needed a tool that allowed us to create diagrams and flows. We tried FigJam, but we have successfully used Miro in the past. Just remember, it should be easily shared with your team.
4. A documentation or writing tool. For the onboarding hub, you will need a place to write and link all the relevant resources. Honestly, almost any software will work for this nowadays. In our case, we used Google Docs since all our documents live in Drive. Don’t want to start from scratch? Feel free to duplicate and use our template.

Recipe

For the vision prototype:

1. Create a vision demo for your project. Here is a deep dive into creating visionary prototypes.
2. Once the prototype is created and finalized, record a video with you (or someone on your team) walking through it. This is the same demo you will be doing when presenting during a meeting but recorded instead. Start by creating a quick script, and after a few recording attempts, the video should be ready to go.
3. Make sure the video is stored somewhere everyone can access, and the proper sharing permissions have been set. Loom or Google Drive make this easy.

For the existing architecture mapping:

1. List the most critical flows and constraints that everyone should know before working on the new project.
2. Once you have a list, go through these flows and take a screenshot of each relevant screen.
3. Add the screenshots to your diagramming tool of preference and connect the flows accordingly.
4. You may notice that some crucial elements cannot be captured with a simple screenshot. You can get creative and add any missing information to your diagram however you want (e.g., using post-its or shapes).

For the onboarding document:

1. Create a new document and add a short welcoming intro. Feel free to duplicate and use our template.
2. List all the relevant stakeholders and members. Pro tip: link their names to Slack or a wiki directory to make it easier for new members to find them.
3. Next, list all important meetings and communication channels that everyone should know about.
4. Add a short description of the team’s culture and processes.
5. Link any critical documents such as your vision prototype, existing specs, and diagrams.

Thanks for reading our recipe. Our goal is to share our experiences working together using a short-read format with instructions that you can try on your own — just like a cookbook. We hope you found it useful!

Katie Le & Nicolas Backal