A few people have asked me what makes an onboarding successful for a new joiner on the team. Managers or tech leads typically plan this in advance to ensure they have a smooth onboarding experience. But what can a new joiner do to ensure a successful onboarding and make a strong start of their journey? That’s what I aim to cover today.
In this post, I’ll share how you can successfully onboard with a new team as a software engineer.
Let’s break it down into four phases: 1st week, 1st month, 3rd month, and 6th month.
Your First Week
On day one, you’ll receive lots of meeting invites, both at the team and company levels. For now, focus on attending team meetings. Your first team meeting will most likely be the daily stand-up.
Observe how the stand-up and other meetings are being run. You might not understand what’s going on at first, and that’s fine. The important thing is to familiarize yourself with the team’s ways of working and how they communicate. How long do stand-up meetings last? How often do they meet for planning? What other meetings do they have? etc. For now, take notes on what’s happening.
Next, you’ll need to set up your development environment.
My teams and I have a culture of empowering new joiners to set up their development environment by completing a small task and getting their first Pull Request (PR) merged during their first week. We make sure new joiners have "good first tickets" to get started with.
As a new joiner, try to find the smallest piece of work you can do in the team’s codebase. Think of it as your welcome gift to the team. This could be something like:
Updating a missing step in the docs
Fixing a typo in the tests
Updating a trivial dependency version
The change itself doesn’t matter. What matters is going through the dev cycle of:
Making changes and running tests
Pushing the changes, creating a PR, and asking for review(s)
Merging the PR and pairing with someone to deploy the changes
Once you break the ice by merging at least one commit to the main/master branch, it becomes easier for you to pick up other small tasks and gradually make progress.
Key Takeaways
Attend the team meetings and observe.
Set up your development environment.
Get your first PR merged.
Your First Month
During your first month, you’ll need to focus on two main things:
Understanding the team’s priorities
Building relationships
1. Team Priorities
Every team has its own set of tools, processes, and ceremonies that help them operate. Take your time to learn these. Additionally, make sure you’re clear on the team’s current priorities and their short-term goals.
Some key questions you can ask in your first month are:
What are the team’s top priorities?
What are the goals for this project or sprint?
How can I help the team in the short-term?
What should I focus on reading?
Don’t rush into suggesting significant changes (unless you’re asked to). Take the time to understand the why behind the way things are done. As you gather more context, you can slowly introduce small, meaningful changes moving forward.
2. Building Relationships
During your first month, it’s important to invest time in building relationships with your teammates. Schedule coffee chats with the developers, designers, product manager, QAs, etc. If they haven’t reached out to you yet, be proactive and reach out yourself—respectfully.
This is your chance to get to know the people you’ll be working closely with, and for them to get to know you.
Example of questions I like to ask when getting to know new teammates:
What’s your favourite thing about working at <Company>?
What’s the most challenging thing you think the team is currently facing?
Asking these two questions to every teammate will help you understand what they enjoy about their work and identify challenges or problems that you may be able to help with in the future.
These questions help you build a future backlog for your proactive mindset!
Key Takeaways
Understand the team’s top priorities and short-term goals.
Build relationships with everyone you'll be working closely with.
Your Third Month
By the end of your third month, you’ll have attended most (if not all) of the company meetings, including team planning, all-hands, retros, guild meetings, backlog refinements, etc.
As you approach your third month, there are two things you should focus on:
Tech Stack
Building Trust
1. Tech Stack
Depending on your skills, there may be some gaps you’ll need to fill when joining a new team. These gaps could be domain-specific knowledge, like AI or cybersecurity, or technology-specific, such as the team’s tech stack.
For example, these could be:
Working with a new programming language?
Get your hands dirty by practicing.
Missing some cloud knowledge?
Ask around for learning resources and spend some time learning the basics.
Haven’t used this monitoring tool before?
Take the time to understand how it works and how to use it. Ask your teammates for tips.
2. Building Trust Through Collaboration
In addition to picking up the tech stack, start collaborating more consistently with your teammates by picking up increasingly challenging tasks and reviewing their work. Build trust within your team by working together as part of the group.
Here are a few ways to do this:
Review your colleagues’ PRs to the best of your ability.
Even if you don’t have full context on the changes, try to review smaller to medium-sized PRs and provide feedback. If the overall changes overall good, let them know. Doing this early gives you the confidence of supporting your colleagues and also understanding the technical changes they’re making.
Take on non-trivial tasks.
You may focus on simpler tasks for the first few weeks, but the real value comes from doing more complex ones.
Try to pick up challenging tasks (with support from the team) that help you understand the codebase faster. Not only does this accelerate your learning, but it also shows the team that you’re eager to contribute, which is highly appreciated.
Key Takeaways
Take the time to learn the tech stack.
Collaborate with the team: review their work to the best of your ability.
Tackle challenging tasks and seek help when you’re stuck.
Your Sixth Month
By the end of your sixth month, you’ll have worked with the team for at least two quarters. You’ll have a solid understanding of how the business operates, and you’ll be a key contributor to the team.
The focus during your sixth month is to consistently deliver great work and deepen your understanding of the business’s long-term goals.
There’s some flexibility here however. Your focus may vary depending on the business needs and discussions with your manager. For example, other areas to concentrate on might include:
Working on a joint project with cross-functional teams
Taking on a high-impact project with your team
Leading a new initiative within the team
Joining a weekly support rota
By the end of your sixth month, you should feel comfortable performing at your best within the team. You should be able to make technical contributions, review design proposals, and actively participate in meetings.
Key Takeaways
You understand the long-term goals for the business.
You’ve developed a good rhythm and are performing at your best.
You actively participate in team-level meetings.
At this stage, you should be able to talk about your team and your work to new joiners.
Conclusion
Your first 6 months are your opportunity to root yourself within the business. You’ll continue to learn as you progress, but once you pass your sixth month, you’ll have a solid foundation to perform at your best.
This is also an opportunity to work closely with your manager and define the goals you want to achieve by your first anniversary. You can also set goals from day one to achieve by your sixth month*.
This is where you can start your proactivity engine.
*Organizations can sometimes have different expectations depending on the role, so it’s important to regularly touch base with your manager.
Key takeaways
1st Week: Attend meetings and get your first PR merged!
1st Month: Get to know the team, learn their ways of working, and understand the short-term goals.
3rd Month: Get comfortable with the tech stack and build trust through collaboration.
6th Month: Understand the business and its long-term goals, and consistently deliver great work.
One More Thing
If you want to learn more about how to find impact, check out this post about “snacking” vs. doing the work that matters:
Great post, Shehab! It's so so so important to listen, show we are trying to understand why it works like that before suggesting. It's a beginner's mistake (and I made it too, back then), but focusing on active listening and asking questions to understand shows more maturity and skills later down the line! And building relationships shouldn't be underestimated!
Overall, your post reminded me of this post:
100% recommend to read, no matter your industry :) https://boz.com/articles/career-cold-start