These are the slides for the StayAtHome conference. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRagMwDuPf0&

1. Onboarding
Developers on a full
remote environment
Jônatas Paganini
@jonatasdp
https://ideia.me
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2. What is onboarding?
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3. 3

4. What full remote
means?
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No office, no where.

5. The Bootcamp team
The team that support newcomers during their first month.
● Dozens of people per month
● Back end, Front end, QA, TL, EM
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Context:

6. What is my legacy?
What legacy will you leave at your company?
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7. Onboarding Guidelines
Why, values, objectives and practices
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8. WHY
● To scale newcomers ramp up in their team
and role.
● To encourage newcomers autonomy.
● To mentor newcomers on demand. Focus
on their weakness.
● To empower newcomers expertise and
align interests with the company initiatives.
● To connect newcomers with the right
people.
● To retain people: the first months are
crucial to make the employee engaged and
happy at work.
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9. Onboarding Values
Self-onboarding
On-demand learning
Continuous improvement
Minimize negative feedback
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10. Self-boarding: Everybody is
asynchronous because
of the nature of the
remote work.
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11. Self-boarding: Every task
needs proactivity to
reach the objective.
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12. Self-boarding: Everything is
supposed to be easy to
go through and achieve
the goal.
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13. On-demand learning: You need
to know our values
and how we work
with our tools.
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14. On-demand learning: Avoid
spending time learning
things ahead of time.
Skip or postpone them.
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15. On-demand learning: Make sure
you understand the
big picture
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16. On-demand learning: Rely on
contextual learning and
go deeper in their
specialties to leverage the
effort in any task.
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17. Continuous improvement: Use critical
thinking to improve the
onboarding process
with every newcomer
feedback. 17

18. Continuous improvement: Run
retrospectives weekly
and keep an open mind
to new ideas. 18

19. Continuous improvement: If you find
something incomplete or
incorrect, fix it to help the next
generation of newcomers to
avoid having the same
problem. 19

20. Minimize negative feedback: Focus on
newcomers positive
experience instead of
negative.
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21. Minimize negative feedback: We try to
focus on action points,
believing everybody that join
the company is intended to
give their best.
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22. Minimize negative feedback: The
onboarding process exists to
explore their best and ramp
up their knowledge in the
company context.
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23. Minimize negative feedback: Work with
newcomers to refine their
learning path for areas they
need to improve on and help
them prioritize instead of
being too critical.
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24. Minimize negative feedback: Positive
feedback allows newcomers to
make progress and open a space to
alignment with company practices,
while negatives should be
perceived as "more to learn" rather
than them being unsuccessful.
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25. Minimize negative feedback: It's
unavoidable that the first days
are mind-blowing for the
newcomer due to the immense
flow of the information and
people to contact with.
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26. Minimize negative feedback: Minimize
does not mean neglect
their mistakes or
overlook their actions.
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27. Minimize negative feedback: Newcomers are
carving their space in the company
and highlighting their positive
actions will encourage them to
own more initiatives that they
get interested in.
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28. Minimize negative feedback: When they
show some real proof of
work, it will be easy to have a
substantial feedback based
on real examples.
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29. Onboarding Objectives
● Timeline
● Checkpoints
● Custom Experience
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30. Timeline
● What is expected in the first day?
● What should they know in the first week?
● What are they going to deliver in the first month?
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31. Checkpoints
List who is going to check what
topics with the newcomer and align
the expectations in the related
subject.
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32. Custom experience
Every newcomer is
encouraged to utilize their
expertise and raise the bar
for the most painful areas.
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33. Onboarding Practices
● Connect key-people
● Strategic Meetings
● Define achievements
● Prepare the backlog
● Avoid deadlines
● Encourage goals
● Knowledge sharing
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34. Onboarding procedure
Task Objective
Invite and grant access to our tools Slack, Github, and other tools that need invite.
Stalk newcomers’ life Review and analyze interviewing notes and online profile.
Send the “domain and interests”
survey
Know more about newcomer domain and interests. The domain
allow to extract the focus of training and the interests help to
guide the newcomer to initiatives that matches with what he is
interested in.
Schedule 1:1 Schedule 1:1 with newcomer to confirm the direction of the
onboarding.
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35. Connect key-people
● Team Intro (warming welcome)
● 1-1 with the mentor
● Suggest key teammates grouped by subject
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36. Encourage goals
● Align goals with weeks and days
● They always have extra work to do
○ Training materials
○ Setup machine
○ Company wide duties
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37. Strategic meetings
Who What When
Team Lead 1:1 meeting First day, every two weeks
Team Lead or Back End Developer Code base walkthrough Second Week
Back End Developer or QA CI overview Second Week
Product Manager KPIs and Product Scope Third Week
Scrum Master or Team Lead Team Process Second Week
Team Lead Exit onboarding interview Fourth Week
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38. Define Achievements
● Map topics and skills required.
● Classify mandatory/optional topics.
● Relate what tasks covers what process.
● Provide material to support each topic.
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39. Prepare the backlog
Task Objective
Exciting hands-on with the mentor In this work, the mentor starts, and the newcomer finishes the task.
Encourage newcomers’
independency
Work closely to the mentor, aligning quality expectations.
Introduce complex task gradually Progressively involve more challenge and key aspects of the
team/role responsibilities
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40. Avoid dead-lines:
● Focus on the learning not in the
delivery.
● The deliverable is get ready to work.
● Choose very low priority tasks.
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41. How to onboard
more people at
the same time?
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42. Scale
● People are different.
● Each newcomer joins a different team.
● Each team has its own needs and
requirements.
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43. Autonomy
● Trust newcomers.
● Guide them to create an
onboarding plan.
● Give them time to shine
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44. ● Everything should be documented
● All repeatable info can be training material
(videos, assessments)
● Track and estimate time for every content
● Choose the proper media for each kind of
content (do not force putting everything in
videos)
● Slides are boring
Content strategies
How to learn what?
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45. The Bootcamp onboarding suggestion
● Participate in regular company wide
training sessions
● Setup our main project using our
installation guide
● Pair with a mentor in your first task
● Open your first Pull Request
First week
● Your computer ready to work
● First PR open
● You pass in the assigned courses
● Get familiar with our development
workflow
Expected outcome
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46. The Bootcamp onboarding suggestion
● Finish online training materials
● Get familiar with our CI
● Start reviewing code
Second week
● First PR merged
● Finished the training materials
● Is familiar with our CI and complete
your-role course
● Interact with at least one PR from
another person
Expected outcome
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47. ● Overwhelm newcomers with content is
not good (embrace ondemand learning instead)
● Newcomers can mentor newcomers (not
always)
● Newcomers can promote sharing
sessions in the place of the mentors (not
always)
● Newcomers can do small touring in the
company teams and understand how the
teams works (not always)
Real Life Stories
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48. What is my legacy?
What legacy will you leave at your company?
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49. Questions?
Jônatas Paganini
@jonatasdp
https://ideia.me
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