Key outcomes
My responsibilities
Hiring new designers
Identifying gaps in existing onboarding
Onboarding new designers
Creating systems, content, and practices
Partnering with managers to iterate & scale
From May 2023 until fall 2024, my design program experienced rapid growth. After a long hiring freeze, we were finally able to hire again and my headcount grew to 60. Having experienced a disorganized, inefficient onboarding myself, I was particularly empathetic to the experience of our new hires. Along with a DesignOps partner, I took a month to rebuild and operationalize our design team onboarding program to ensure an amazing first impression for all of the new hires joining our team.
Successfully onboarded 35+ new hires across roles, levels, and geographies.
Reduced time-to-productivity from months to days! New hires can meaningfully contribute within 2 weeks of joining.
Improved team health and cohesion, as new hires feel welcomed and well-oriented from Day 1.
Created a scalable onboarding program that is easy for new hires to use and easy for design leaders to maintain
New Hire Onboarding
My team
1 program director (me)
1 DesignOps manager
Problem statement
We scaled from 4 to 60 designers in under 15 months. The new folks were in wildly different time zones, and most of them were unfamiliar with enterprise security. Up until this point, we lacked a structured onboarding program, and new managers were overwhelmed trying to onboard themselves while ramping their teams. The results was that new hires were not able to meaningfully contribute until months after their join date.
Solution
The new onboarding program is a robust set of Airtable-based resources and systems that set a new hire up for success from Day 1. The new hire meets with their manager and design lead as soon as they start and receives a set of metered onboarding tasks to complete at various intervals (day 1, week 1, week 2, etc). This guides the new designer through an intentional journey, learning the team and domain along the way. The capstone of the program is a starter project that gets the designer familiar with our tools, practices, and the actual product they'll be supporting.
