Onboarding for New Engineers

Companies: Yesware (2019) & CarGurus (2021)

Opportunity: When I was working at both Yesware and Cargurus, respectively, I identified an opportunity and a deep need to help streamline the onboarding process for existing and newly hired (frontend) engineers.

Goals:

Provide relevant design resources for new (and existing) engineers to reference
Provide insight into how the UX team operates
Set up a new engineer and their respective designer for success by establishing their working relationship early
Continue to infuse UX design awareness into the rest of the org

Deliverables: I created the onboarding slides that I'd present with new(and curious existing) engineers in a short 30-minute meeting, either individually or as a cohort. The content included an intro to the design team members, high-level design process, how to use design tools as engineers, miscellaneous tips (eg. UI considerations), and design system resources and processes, and an opportunity to ask questions or get clarifications. There was a corresponding Wiki page with full content notes of what's covered during the onboarding.

Impact: For both companies, the overall feedback was extremely positive, from an individual contributor stand point to the overall company software development impact. New engineers have reported that having this content upfront was immensely helpful and existing engineers stated they wish this had been around when they first started at the company.

From my personal experience and what my design colleagues reported, we found that the engineers who started with this presentation as part of their company onboarding ramped up much quicker and were more comfortable collaborating much sooner.

As CarGurus had a larger design team and was an overall much larger company than Yesware, this task was delegated to individual designers to onboard their new engineer colleagues as this would help build their relationship much sooner.