Introduction

As part of my PhD research, I did long interviews with many engineers from SaaS product companies to understand their onboarding journey, esp. how they ramped up on the product.

In many cases, I realized that seemingly small things had an outsized positive impact on their onboarding journey (they seemed to have learned better, faster and more).

Asking questions

Mostly, new campus hires do not ask questions. Some of them said that is because they are used to not asking questions in class, and onboarding feels like a classroom! However, in many instances, the new hire started asking questions at some point, and their experience changed significantly, for better. There were external situations which caused them to start asking questions (those are stories for a different day, very fascinating!), but they benefitted a lot when they started asking questions.

Taking notes purposefully

Not many people reported taking notes. I found there were a few who took notes with specific goals – one of them wanted to capture what they didn’t understand, another took down everything so they could revise within 24 hours, still others had a mental model of the product where they filled the gap of understanding through these notes. People who had specific goals when taking notes seemed to have had much better experience of onboarding than those who didn’t take notes or took them without clear purpose.

Testing the product

Some people were assigned the task to read and execute test cases, others ha mentors telling them to do so. Either way, those who engaged in this activity reported much better experience with onboarding (they understood the broad picture of the product better) than those who did not.

If you are joining the workforce soon as a new campus hire engineer, do keep these in mind and try them out during your onboarding journey. Do stay proactive and ask for help (for ex, if your mentor is not responsive and so your questions are unanswered), you will be surprised at how supportive onboarding teams generally are!