3 Keys to Onboarding
This week was my first week on my new team at YouTube. Effectively onboarding and ramping up on a new team can be difficult but throughout the years I've found three things are key to doing so successfully.
The first thing that can help you onboard to a new team is to ask questions. While this sounds simple, it’s often either overlooked or newcomers will worry that they’re asking “stupid” questions. But the truth is, this is the time to ask any and all questions as teammates have no reason to believe you “should” know any of the information regarding your team’s tech stack, product, or otherwise.
A couple examples of questions I’ve asked over this past week have been: “What’s an RSS feed?”, “What does insert specific acryonym stand for?”, and “How does monetization work in our space?”.
Asking questions to your teammates also allow you to expedite your learning and help you ramp up faster since you can learn from each of your teammates’ own onboarding experiences. As more and more folks onboard, the process should get smoother and morme effective. Utilizing their experiences can help you become effective on the team faster.
The next thing that’s crucial when joining a new team is understanding your product area. Learning a team’s tech stack is one challenge, but deeply learning the product space in which your team operates, the value it provides to customers, and the features it supports is paramount to ramping up on a team.
Possessing deep technical knowledge and joining it with a keen product understanding is the perfect marriage of information to make you a valuable asset to your team. Without understanding your product you can’t possible understand the needs of your users and how your product works to solve them. Knowing the ins and outs of your product also helps give additional color to the technical landscape of how your product is developed and maintained.
Once you’ve asked questions to help get your bearings on the team and studied your product you’re now ready for the final key to onboarding which is discovering opportunities for improvement. One of the best things about joining as a new team member is that you bring a fresh perspective.
Since you have no preconceived notions from a technical or product perspective you bring a very unbiased, valuable opinion to the table. This puts you in a unique situation to be able to identify opportunities for improvement in your team's binaries and the product you own. The beauty of this, is that this is also what helps you become effective on the team. You see something that can be fixed or improved and then you can actually do the work to make it so.
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