Project
Reinventing Onboarding for Engineers
Role
Product Design
Team
3x Product Managers
1x VP of Sales
1x Head of Marketing
Duration
6 months
Intro
A better way to onboard engineers
Towards the end of 2021, we set out to disrupt engineer onboarding. This case study encompasses my journey with my team as we built, failed, learned, and improved the product for our customers.
How it impacted our onboarding:
42%
reduction in onboarding time across Educative teams
1.5x ARR
through signing deals with our 6 onboarding customers
My Role
Designing a 0 to 1 Product
This was my first 0 -> 1 product at Educative. I partnered with 3 product managers on devising a solution. During the early phases of the project, I brainstormed with product managers and brought alignment to their approaches on several occasions. This project had a very ambitious deadline, so I had to roll up my sleeves and design end-to-end features like creating an onboarding plan, adding content such as Assessments, Tasks, Projects, and Quizzes. I designed the onboarding journey, defined roles, assignment to new hires, and then visualizing the statistics on the dashboard.
Onboarding takes about 9 months
Our sales team had been in conversation with a few engineering teams. One of the teams even shared their onboarding template with us. We talked to several other teams and pretty much every engineering team followed a weekly onboarding approach, where they would assign tasks to new hires with a mentor.
The Engineering Manager's problem
It takes 9-12 months to fully onboard an engineer to the team. The average tenure of an engineer in a company is around 18 months. The biggest problem our customers faced was the lost productivity due to long onboarding timelines which very close to the average tenure of employees in those teams. That's around 6 months of productivity. The goal was to decrease time to productivity, which would automatically increase the productivity period for engineers.
The Engineer's problem
Engineers consider learning a huge part of their jobs and want to continuously learn new technologies and stacks to stay ahead of the curve.
75%
are actively on the lookout for new roles
42%
seriously consider opportunity to learn when comparing employeers
54%
say lack of resources to increase confidence in work is unappealing
53%
say a focus on developer experience makes a company appealing
Looking around
Researching onboarding-adjacent products
We started looking at existing onboarding products to see how they attempt to solve the problem and figure out gaps where we can have a competitive edge.
Features
After the journey and flows had been decided, I spent prototyping and wireframing several key screens, once I had alignment through leadership, product, sales, and engineering, I decided to finalize the designs for the MVP release.
Structurally, onboarding plans are classified into weeks, containing the Tasks, Modules, and Connects that new hires must complete for their onboarding.
I designed a fully featured editor to help Engineering Managers and Mentors easily create and Publish their Plans. The editor took several iterations to perfect, and even more work is being done today to optimize performance and user journeys. Users can add anything from a single sentence to a fully coded application to their onboarding plans.
With the help of the product manager, I created a fully featured dashboard for our onboarding managers based on insights that will help them make clear decisions about their onboarding plans.
In collaboration with Sales, I worked on designing our onboarding landing page. The purpose of this page is to invite users to our interactive demo and lead them to a discussion with Sales.
© Mustafa Ali Akbar