The document discusses effective onboarding at the individual, team, and organizational level. At the individual level, it focuses on providing new hires with sufficient context to start contributing quickly through environment setup, understanding technical stacks and business context. At the team level, it recommends pairing new members, emphasizing knowledge sharing over metrics, and fostering psychological safety. At the organizational level, it suggests supporting teams' onboarding processes through retrospectives and identifying best practices to create a scalable approach.

1. EFFECTIVE TEAM
ONBOARDING
Commit Conf - Nov 2018
María Gómez @mariascandella
Jorge Agudo @joragupra

2. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Why is onboarding important?
2

3. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Three dimensional onboarding process: Goals
3
Being able to effectively
contribute to the team
fast.
Achieve a frictionless and
scalable process.
Reach business as usual
performing mode as soon
as possible.
INDIVIDUAL TEAM ORGANISATION

4. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence 4

5. As an Individual
I want to have enough context
So that I can contribute to the team
5

6. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
“How long is the time gap between
starting on the project, and making my
first meaningful commit to the code
base? [..] the shorter that time gap, the
happier I’ve been over the long term as a
developer on that project.”
Vishal Bardoloi
https://bit.ly/2HixcfS
Time to first commit
6

7. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Time to first commit
7
Environment setup
Understand Tech Stack Access to tools
Understand my strengths and gaps
Understand Business Context

8. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Understand Business Context
Successful teams
have a clear vision
8

9. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Understand Tech Stack
9
● Make use of models to communicate
more effectively
● Avoid sharing too much at once, and allow
newcomers to process the information at
their own pace.
● Share as much context as possible in a
digestible way

10. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
“The C4 model is a way to help
software development teams
describe and communicate
software architecture”
Simon Brown
https://c4model.com/
10

11. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Architecture
Decision Records ● Document design decisions
● Provide context
● Explain rationale
● Describe implications
* Lightweight Architecture Decision Records have been in the Tech Radar since Nov 2017
“Today's problems come from
yesterday's solutions.”
11

12. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Access to tools
12
Comms channels
CI / CD tools
Infra / Monitoring /
Logging
Team Wikis
& Boards
Code repos

13. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Local environment setup
13
● Optimize for developer experience.
● Make use of automation and virtualization
to speed up this process.
● Importance of a good README.

14. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Understand my strengths & gaps
14
● How do I fit in the team?
● What’s my role and expectations?
● From unknown unknowns to known unknowns.

15. As a Team
I want to onboard in an effective way
So that I can continue providing
value with the least disruption
15

16. Performance ≠ Lines of Code
16

17. Performance ≠ Velocity
17

18. Performance ≠ Utilization
18

19. 19

20. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
LEAD TIME
How fast work can be completed?
Team metrics
20
DEPLOYMENT FREQUENCY
How often code is deployed to prod?
MTR (Mean time to
recovery)
How quickly can service be restored?
CHANGE FAIL RATE
What percentage of changes to
production fail?

21. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Onboarding plan
● Start lean
● Get everyone involved
● Get feedback
● Iterate
21
"Plans are useless but
planning is
indispensable"

22. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Pairing
22
SHARE KNOWLEDGE
Context
Business
Tech stack
COMMUNICATE
Getting to know better
Understand how teammates work

23. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
Psychological Safety
23
Can we take risks in
this team without
feeling insecure or
embarrassed?
5 Keys to Team Success according to Google

24. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence 24
LEAD BY EXAMPLE ACTIVE LISTENING
SAFE ENVIRONMENT OPEN MINDSET

25. serendipity
/ˌsɛr(ə)nˈdɪpɪti/
noun
1. the occurrence and development of
events by chance in a happy or
beneficial way.
2. "a fortunate stroke of serendipity"
25

26. As an Organisation
I want to empower teams
So that we can learn and define best
practices to have a scalable process
26

27. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
How?
27
SUPPORT
Allow time and resources
for teams to improve their
onboarding processes
Mix up your images to match
your content.
Mix up your images to match
your content.
RETROS
Mix teams to share their
experiences
CONNECT
Identify processes which
work

28. ©ThoughtWorks 2018 Commercial in Confidence
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
28
How likely is it that you
would recommend our
company/product/service
to a friend or colleague?
Detractors Passive Promoters
NET Promoter Score = % Promoters - % Detractors

29. The Enterprise
onboarding plan
Don't try to build the
greatest company
onboarding plan
Don't push your plan
top-down
29

30. 30
Thanks!
@mariascandella
@joragupra