Onboard a New Hire

A new hire should ship to production in their first week. Their first month should look like the job: real work, specific feedback every week, and a 30/60/90-day plan that says what success looks like. The first thirty days are the trial period, whether or not the offer called it that, and day thirty ends with a decision on whether the hire is working out.

Prepare before day one

• A 30/60/90-day plan. The manager writes it, and the two of you review it on the first day. It names observable outcomes (a change in production on day two, a small project shipped by the end of week two), so it also works as the rubric for the day-thirty decision.
• Access. Repo, tracker, Slack, and standup, all working on day one. A new hire who spends two days waiting on access has learned something about how the team operates.

Assign homework

• Read Winning as a Developer. Not rocket science, but getting this stuff right matters.
• Read the team values and YOU are an Account Manager.
• Think about the getting-to-know-you questions before the first 1-1.

Ship in week one

• Day two. An onboarding-sized ticket, shipped to production. With AI tools reading the codebase alongside them, a new engineer can find their way around a system in hours. The ticket proves the whole path works for them: access, local setup, review, deploy.
• End of week two. A small project shipped, with the new hire as DRI.
• Weeks three and four. A larger piece of real work, picked from the roadmap, so the day-thirty decision rests on the kind of work the job actually involves.
• Weekly. 1-1s from week one, and specific feedback at the end of each week, in both directions.
• Day thirty. The decision, said out loud with the reasons, either way.

Plan the long term

In month two, build a 6/12/24-month plan together from the hire's personal goals and the organization's. It becomes the agenda for the career-planning topic in 1-1s.