How to Onboard to Your New Job Like a Pro

POV: you got a new job! You signed your offer and your start date is circled on the calendar. You’re excited to meet your team and dig into the work.

You log on that first week ready to go, but find yourself with less onboarding support than you were expecting. This could be for any number of reasons - maybe your new company doesn’t have a clear onboarding process, or that your new boss was busy and hasn’t prepared enough for your start date. Regardless of the cause, don’t stress! You can use the checklist of questions below to take the wheel and onboard yourself like a pro.

In a previous newsletter, I wrote about the 3P’s framework and how you can use it to have more effective 1:1’s with your boss.

We’ll use it again here to structure our onboarding question checklist; as it represents the three broad categories of knowledge you’ll need in order to be effective in your new role:

Onboarding Checklist

1. People

   1. Stakeholders & Their Roles

      1. What’s the organizational structure - what does it look like?

         1. How is this structure reflected in how teams work together?

         2. What about in the decision making process?

      2. What are the different functional teams in the company?

      3. Within those groups, which individuals will be your stakeholders?

2. Process

   1. Structure & Rhythm of Product Development Process

      1. What are the ceremonies and what are they used for? Who runs them and who is involved? What is my role expected to do, prepare, or contribute?

      2. What artifacts (roadmaps, briefs, technical docs) does the team produce? Who uses them? What is my role in creating or maintaining them?

   2. Goal Setting

      1. What’s the cadence - quarterly? Semi-annually?

      2. Is this tops down, bottoms up, or a mix of both?

   3. Decision Making

      1. How do important decisions get made?

      2. Who is involved and what is their role in the decision making process?

3. Product

   1. Connect Business Strategy to the Product Strategy

      1. What is the overarching business strategy & company vision?

      2. What business objectives will my product drive?

      3. What are my goals & how are they measured?

      4. How do those objectives ladder up to the company vision & strategy?

   2. Build your Product Expertise

      1. How does the product work?

      2. How is it positioned compared to competitors?

      3. What does it do well and what doesn’t it do well?

      4. How do customers / users feel about the product? What about internal teams?

These questions are designed to help you develop a thorough understanding of the factors that will influence how you do your job. Keep these handy in your first few weeks in your new role and revisit them periodically - you’ll be surprised how quickly you can onboard yourself and become productive in your role!