New Hires: They’re More Similar to Your Product’s New Users Than You Think
I joined Segment about six months ago as a Product Designer for our Self-Service CX team. Our goal as a team is to help accelerate our self-service customers’ understanding and ultimate adoption of Segment. We want to ensure that our customers are successful, so that they become champions of Segment and choose to stick with us for the long run. We focus a lot of our work around optimizing metrics like activation, adoption, and retention.
As I’ve delved further into the problem space of product onboarding, I’ve been simultaneously getting onboarded to a new team and company. I am extremely grateful to have joined a design team (and company!) that dedicates so much thought and care into the onboarding experience. My first few months at Segment have been about getting familiar with our customer landscape, the team and product area I work on, the processes we have as a design team, and so much more. Onboarding to a new team while working on how to successfully get our customers set up has made something crystal clear: product onboarding and people onboarding are quite similar.
But how exactly, do the two overlap? As someone who is either responsible for onboarding new folks to a team, or just welcoming new team members, there are a few concepts from product onboarding to consider applying to your process:
- Understand who you’re serving
- Prioritize inclusion
- Cut down the time to value
- Set them up for long term success
Understand who you’re serving
What I learned from product onboarding: In order to build an onboarding experience for your customers, you must first understand who they are. What roles do they have and what are their responsibilities? What types of companies do they work at? Why did they sign up for your product? What goals do they have in using your product? By first getting to know your customers and building strong personas around who they are, you’ll be able to build more tailored experiences specific to their needs.
What that means for people onboarding: With new employees, it’s imperative that you understand who they are, what their goals are with this new job, and what resources they’ll need to succeed. Starting a new job and finding a home on a new team can be tough, and it’s important that they’re set up for success. In their first few weeks of joining, have conversations around what their goals are, where they want to grow, areas they might want to get their feet wet, what they’d like to improve, etc. so you can help them design a path that gets them there.
Prioritize inclusion
What I learned from product onboarding: Knowing your customer is only the beginning. As they start to use your product, it’s important to understand what the user journey looks like for them. Where are their pain points or frustrations? Where do they get lost or maybe drop off? How can you help them get up and running more efficiently? Once you understand what their journey looks like and how they might feel at different points in time, you can ensure you design inclusive experiences that provide them with the proper resources along the way when they need them most.
What that means for people onboarding: Starting a new job can be intimidating, and it’s important that your new employees feel like they are part of the team from the get-go. One way to do this is to provide them with resources that will ease their newbie anxiety, as well as facilitate team bonding sessions to include them in. At Segment, our design team has a few rituals that aim to ensure new teammates feel welcome and know where to turn if they have an issue or a question. Here are a couple of examples:
- Dear New Designer Letter: Everyone on the team writes a letter about a specific theme of their choosing that either gives new designers words of wisdom, actionable steps to take during onboarding, things they wish they’d known, etc. This was hands down one of my favorite parts of onboarding to our team because of how incredibly thoughtful it was. It also provided great conversation starters with the designers on the team.
- Design Buddy and Design Mentor: When a new designer onboards, they get both a design buddy and a design mentor (immediate friends for the win). The buddy is there to help them navigate the company and the org, to answer any random questions, and to just be a ~ friend~ . The mentor is there to help the new designer understand what design is at Segment, how to design for the specific product area they’re working in, and to answer any design-specific questions. Having both of these resources gives new employees a safe space to ask questions, gain clarity, and avoid large pain points along the way.
Cut down the time to value
What I learned from product onboarding: A large cause of losing customers after onboarding is because the customer doesn’t see (or get) the value of your product. It’s important to avoid this by getting to the “aha” moment as quickly as possible. The “aha” moment, for those who are unfamiliar, is when a customer first comes to realize the value your product brings to them. It’s also important to note that there isn’t just one definitive “aha” moment — customers can experience multiple “aha” moments as they discover more and more value out of your product.
What that means for people onboarding: When you hire a new employee, you want to ensure that they get to the “aha” moment as quickly as possible. This means getting them to a point where they have enough confidence to say “I get it” and can push forward to be productive contributors to the team. Segment is a pretty technical product, so we often joke that onboarding is akin to drinking from a firehose because there is so much to learn. Though it’s important to get employees to filter the water they drink from said firehose so they’re not overwhelmed, the more resources you’re able to provide to help them drink faster will help them become valuable members of the team more quickly.
This could include providing them with the proper resources to get as much context as possible about the company, the team, processes, and the product area they’ll be working on. One of the most beneficial things that helped me lower my time to value was multiple meetings with PMs, designers, and engineers who so graciously walked me through the product and accompanying user problems.
Set them up for long term success
What I learned from product onboarding: Getting to the “aha” moment is great, but you want to make sure your customers are motivated to keep coming back. To do this, you have to ensure that they continue discovering additional value as they get better at using your product. It’s helpful to first think about tasks that you think are more appropriate for them to accomplish within their first few visits, as well as when to introduce more complexity. In addition, providing clear upgrade paths for products that have pricing models (like ours!) help foster a longer term mindset.
What that means for people onboarding: It would be foolish for me to suggest that it’s practical to hope that new employees stick around forever. That being said, it’s important to foster an environment in which they feel that they have room (and have the support needed) to grow. Similar to specifying certain tasks customers should accomplish at different points throughout their onboarding experience, creating a 30–60–90 day plan for new employees is a great way to set clear expectations and provide reassurance that you’re setting them up for success. Being greeted by a 30–60–90 day plan on my first day was such a pleasant surprise — it gave me an extremely clear idea of what the expectations were throughout my first three months and where I should focus my time.
In addition, it’s important that you have the resources to dedicate to growing this person’s career. It’s doing folks a disservice if you hire them and you don’t have the proper resources to help them grow. They will likely realize, sooner rather than later, that there isn’t much room for them.
At the end of the day, only you can define how best to get new employees at your company onboarded in an efficient and inclusive way. Speaking of, our team at Segment is hiring and would love for you to join us. And if not, hopefully this gives you another perspective to take on as you welcome new members to your team!
Thanks to Kate Butterfield and Hareem Mannan. And shout-out to the entire team on being so thoughtful and welcoming throughout our onboarding process.
