Team and Culture · Published September 5, 2026
The Newcomer's First Month
The goal of month one is not output; it is knowing who to ask when stuck.
We have onboarded many people. The strongest shipped in week one; the slowest started after a month. Looking back, the difference tracked the onboarding plan far more than ability. Our process is much clearer than five years ago.
Week one
Day one has two tasks only: get every account and permission, and learn everyone's name and role.
The first two days are for running the project: local environment, database, deploy scripts. Newcomers fix outdated docs directly, which beats making veterans rewrite them.
Assign a mentor who explicitly welcomes questions every day, without limit.
Goals for the month
The first real task is small: a medium bug or a small component that ships within a week.
Walk through each deploy and review together once; familiarity makes everything faster after.
End the month with half an hour: where they got stuck, which docs confused them, where the mentor fell short.
How fast newcomers settle reflects the team's organisational skill, not their own. Treat onboarding as a project and it pays back directly.
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