Onboarding program

onboarding-program

When to use

• A first onboarding program is needed because hires are arriving and ramping is ad-hoc, expensive, and slow.
• An existing program is producing inconsistent ramp times across roles or cohorts and the question is where the program leaks productivity.
• A new role family (first sales hire, first designer, first SRE) is being added and the question is what role-shaped onboarding looks like for this function.

Do NOT use as a customer-onboarding surface (route to Wing-3 onboarding-design (H11); this skill is internal-employee, that one is external-customer), as a performance-feedback skill (route to Q4 perf-feedback-craft), or for HRIS-onboarding-module configuration.

Cognition cluster

• Mental model 1 — First principles. Strip onboarding to: what does this person need to know, do, and decide alone before being net-positive? Most onboarding programs over-index on what's easy to teach (history, slides) and under-index on what's hard (decision rights, who-knows-what, codebase / domain context). See mental-models.md § 1.
• Mental model 21 — Second-order thinking. Onboarding is paid for in mentor time. A 4-hour-per-week mentor commitment from a senior person costs more than people realise; mentor capacity is the binding constraint on hiring velocity. Read mentor cost as part of the program, not a free input.
• Mental model 28 — Inversion. "What would make this hire fail in their first 90 days?" Inversion surfaces the load-bearing risks (unclear scope, no early win, missing tools, no peer relationship). Most onboarding failures trace to one of these four, not to skill gaps.
• Mental model 26 — Optionality. A heavy template onboarding preserves consistency optionality but forecloses role-specific optionality. A pure free-form onboarding preserves customization but forecloses scalability. Pick the trade explicitly per role family.
• Context-spine — org-stage + product + customer-segment. Read org-stage for what's affordable (10-person co: founder onboards; 50-person co: managers + buddies; 150+: dedicated onboarding owner). Read product for domain complexity (deep regulated domain = longer ramp). Read customer-segment for which roles need customer-context immersion early.

Cross-wing handoff

• Composed downstream of Q1 org-design — onboarding shape follows team structure; onboarding without a clear team home is broken from day one.
• Composed downstream of Q2 comp-banding — level + scope expectations from comp banding anchor the ramp expectations.
• Hands off to Q4 perf-feedback-craft for the first 30 / 60 / 90 feedback checkpoint shape.
• Distinct from Wing-3 H11 onboarding-design (customer onboarding) — different audience, different proof bar.

Procedure

Step 0: Identify role-family and ramp definition

Before designing the program, name:

1. What role family is in scope? (eng IC, eng manager, PM, design, sales AE, sales SDR, CS, ops, finance). Onboarding shape varies sharply by family.
2. What does "ramped" mean for this family? — define net-positive in concrete behavior: an eng IC ships a PR alone by week 4 and owns a workstream by week 12; an AE books N qualified meetings by week 4 and closes a deal by quarter end. Adjective-only definitions ("getting up to speed") fail the bar.
3. What's the realistic time-to-ramp benchmark? — typically 30 / 60 / 90 days for individual contributors; 6 months for managers; 6–12 months for senior leaders. Compare proposed program length to benchmark.

A program with no concrete ramped-definition is unfalsifiable.

Step 1: Map what the role needs to know, do, decide alone

For the role family, enumerate three buckets:

1. Know — domain context (industry, regulation, product), system context (codebase tour, dataflow, ops), people context (who owns what, who decides what). Force concrete artifacts (which doc, which repo, which dashboard) — not abstract topics.
2. Do — first owned task, first reviewed task, first solo task, first shipped task. Sequence from low-risk to medium-risk; arrange to produce one demonstrable early win in week 1–2.
3. Decide alone — what kind of decision can this person make without consulting? Spell out the boundary; the absence of this is the #1 cause of slow ramp.

Most onboarding programs cover Know well, Do partially, Decide-alone almost never. The last bucket is the leverage point.

Step 2: Design 30 / 60 / 90 milestones

For each milestone, name:

1. 30-day — Know complete; first owned task shipped; named buddy and named manager 1:1 cadence locked.
2. 60-day — Owns a workstream segment; has produced one visible artifact for the team; has had at least one feedback checkpoint (composes Q4).
3. 90-day — Net-positive on standalone contribution; named scope for next quarter; has built one cross-team relationship.

Each milestone needs an objective check (shipped artifact, behavior observed) — not "feels good" attestation.

Step 3: Pair the mentor / buddy / manager triad

Three roles, distinct purposes:

1. Manager — sets scope, removes blockers, runs 1:1 cadence (weekly first 90 days, biweekly after).
2. Buddy — peer-level, week-1 to week-12, low-friction questions, social onboarding. Buddy is not a mentor; mixing the role overloads the buddy.
3. Mentor (optional, role-dependent) — senior in the craft, monthly cadence, growth-focused. Reserved for higher-stakes hires (senior eng, manager, first-in-role).

Mentor / buddy capacity is the binding constraint; if there are no available buddies, hiring should pause, not push through.

Step 4: Build the early-win path

Inversion: "what makes this hire feel they made the wrong choice in week 2?" — usually: no tools, no clarity, no peer, no early demonstrable win.

1. Pre-day-1: laptop / accounts / access provisioned. Verified by the manager before day 1, not assumed.
2. Day 1–5: orientation, codebase / domain tour, 1:1s with named peers, manager 1:1 scheduled out for 90 days.
3. Week 2–4: first owned task — selected to be shippable, visible, low-risk, but real. Not a synthetic onboarding-only task; a real one.
4. Week 4–6: first feedback checkpoint; explicit acknowledgement of one thing going well + one thing to adjust.

The early-win path is the #1 driver of 12-month retention for new hires.

Step 5: Validate the program before emitting

Before producing the artifact, verify three things:

1. Ramp-definition concreteness — confirm Step 0 named net-positive in concrete behavior; adjective-only definitions fail and must be re-run.
2. Decide-alone coverage — assert Step 1's third bucket is non-empty; decide-alone gaps are the canonical ramp-slowing failure mode.
3. Mentor capacity check — verify the buddy / mentor commitments fit within available mentor capacity for the cohort size; overbooked mentors collapse onboarding silently.

All three must pass. If any fails, return to the failing step.

Step 6: Emit the onboarding program

Produce the onboarding-program artifact for the role-family owner (engineering lead, sales lead, design lead) and people partner. The artifact frames the ramped definition, the Know/Do/Decide map, the 30/60/90 milestones, the triad assignments, and the early-win path.

Related Skills

WHEN to use this

• First-pass internal-employee onboarding program design.
• Role-family-specific onboarding (first sales hire, first SRE, first designer).
• Existing program audit when ramp times are inconsistent or long.

WHEN NOT to use this

• Customer onboarding — route to Wing-3 onboarding-design (H11); different audience entirely.
• Performance / feedback design — route to perf-feedback-craft (Q4); Q3 composes Q4 at milestone checkpoints, doesn't replace it.
• Org structure decisions — route to org-design (Q1).
• Compensation banding — route to comp-banding (Q2).

When the agent should load this

• "Design our onboarding."
• "Why are new hires ramping slow?"
• "What does the first 90 days look like for a sales AE?"
• "Set up a buddy program."
• "Wie bauen wir das Onboarding für Engineering auf?"

Output

1. ramp-definition.md — role-family × concrete ramped-definition × benchmark time-to-ramp.
2. know-do-decide-map.md — three buckets with concrete artifacts and decide-alone boundary.
3. milestones-30-60-90.md — milestone × objective check × feedback checkpoint.
4. triad-assignment.md — manager / buddy / mentor mapping with capacity check.
5. early-win-path.md — pre-day-1 through week-6 sequence with named first owned task pattern.

Gotcha

• "Read these 40 docs" is a placebo onboarding. Force know-by-doing.
• Buddy ≠ mentor. Overloading the buddy with growth conversations collapses the role.
• Decide-alone boundaries unwritten = stalled ramps. The single biggest leverage point most programs miss.
• Synthetic onboarding tasks teach less than real tasks selected for low risk. Resist the urge to manufacture training-only work.

Do NOT

• Do NOT skip the ramped-definition step; un-defined ramp is unfalsifiable.
• Do NOT assign onboarding to an already-overloaded buddy; the program looks great on paper and fails in week 3.
• Do NOT confuse this with customer onboarding (H11); the two operate on different proof bars.

Runnable example

Series-A SaaS hires its first dedicated SRE, no prior SRE onboarding shape.

• Step 0 — Role family: senior SRE. Ramped means: on-call alone by week 12, owns one production reliability workstream by month 6, has shipped one runbook and one alert-quality improvement by month 3.
• Step 1 — Know: prod architecture doc, incident-response runbooks, last 6 months of incidents. Do: shadow on-call weeks 1–2, secondary on-call weeks 3–6, primary on-call by week 12. Decide-alone: page severity, can declare incident, can deploy hotfix during business hours; cannot make architecture changes alone before month 4.
• Step 2 — Milestones: 30-day Know complete + first runbook PR shipped; 60-day secondary on-call + alert-quality artifact produced; 90-day primary on-call + first standalone reliability initiative scoped.
• Step 3 — Triad: manager = VP Eng (weekly 1:1); buddy = senior backend engineer (peer, week 1–12); mentor = none initially (no other SREs in-house; consider external mentor at month 6).
• Step 4 — Early win: first runbook PR for a known-rough incident scenario; shippable in week 2, visible to whole eng team.
• Step 5 — Validate: ramped definition concrete; decide-alone boundary explicit; buddy commitment is 2h/week which fits the backend engineer's current load. Pass.
• Step 6 — Emit onboarding program for SRE role family; flag to revisit at month 6 once second SRE is hired (mentor capacity will exist then).