
What is successful onboarding? - sushobhan
https://news.greylock.com/why-onboarding-is-the-most-crucial-part-of-your-growth-strategy-8f9ad3ec8d5e
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sethammons
I was expecting a piece on onboarding new employees, turns out this one is on
onboarding new users. As a user, I really appreciated a great onboarding
experience. The best I can recall was Slack some years ago (I'd assume they
are even better now). When you first signed on, you got an interactive
tutorial that took no more than a handful of seconds to familiarize yourself
with the product. It was quick, efficient, and visually nice.

On the thought of onboarding new employees, I think that is very important
too, and for the same reason as in the article: you want folks to stick
around! On our team, we have a whole processes set up to give new team members
the best chance for success and as efficient as possible spin up. We have some
tutorials for working in our stack, resources for the languages if you are
unfamiliar, some tasks for "do X with the Y API." We get them familiar with
our stack and architecture, getting them to a spot where they can whiteboard
our non-trivial interactions of different services. We do regular check ins on
this process which we estimate can take up to a week when you first start.
Meanwhile, we do more pair programming than normal, giving the new team mate
the ability to drive, allowing them to start feeling that they add value day
one/two. This has taken some effort to put together, and is a far cry better
than when I started there years ago. Back then it was sink or swim and baptism
by fire, haha. I think it took nearly a month to get one of my testing
environments up and getting green tests at the time (for a myriad of reasons).

~~~
codinghorror
Oddly enough, Slack has moved away from this kind of extensive bot Q&A
onboarding. Last time I checked a few months ago it was one or two perfunctory
questions, then a number of overlaid "look at this, here is what it does"
divs. I was surprised.

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joshschreuder
[https://www.useronboard.com/](https://www.useronboard.com/) does a bunch of
great walkthroughs of good and bad user onboarding experiences.

