Resume

About

Work

Reinventing Onboarding for Engineers

Case Study

Role

Product Design

Team

3x Product Managers

1x VP of Sales

1x Head of Marketing

Duration

6 months

Impact

  1. Up to 42% reduction in onboarding time across Educative teams

  2. 1.5x increase in ARR

  3. Hundreds of minutes saved in sales calls through an interactive demo

Intro

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.

Research

I partnered with one of our Product Managers and the Sales team to figure out the pain points of Engineering Managers and newly hired Engineers. We referred to secondary research and sales calls with existing customers.

The EM'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. 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.

Competitive Research

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.

Onboarding Plans: Learner View

Structurally, onboarding plans are classified into weeks, containing the Tasks, Modules, and Connects that users must complete for their onboarding.

Onboarding Plans: Editor View

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.

Onboarding Dashboard

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.

Onboarding Landing Page

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.

Feature that failed

We went on to design several features throughout the year. As we scaled the product, we made some mistakes and are transferring the learnings to our ongoing work.

Ask for Help

We built a feature for our users to ask their mentors for help whenever they are stuck in an onboarding plan. However, we found the following:

  1. People are hesitant to accept the fact that they are stuck.

  2. They would rather talk to their mentor in person or via Slack.

  3. People are more likely to talk to their peers in-person and solve problems together.

Learning Outcomes

Talk to the users to discover their pain points. Some behaviors are not translatable to a feature, and validate the feature with an MVP version before focusing the effort on a full-fledged design.

The aftermath

Onboarding ended up becoming very successful with our Enterprise customers. We met with our customers to improve their experience and responded to feature requests. We integrated the feedback, continued to improve our UX, and made it resilient over time.

There are many things I cannot list in the case study due to the scale of the product. However, I am happy to discuss the details during the interview. If you have more questions, please contact me at mustafa.ali.akbar96@gmail.com.