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> It also doesn’t give the customer any value, so how do you justify losing out making stuff better for the people who pay your company money? You are going to

> It also doesn’t give the customer any value, so how do you justify losing out making stuff better for the people who pay your company money? You are going to generate more value for your customers long term by having employees who feel like their time and contributions are valued. Solving these types of problems (onboarding, knowledge management, communications, internal tooling) are literal force multipliers for companies. But they are often ignored by leadership because they don't show immediate revenue value.

TameAntelope 5y ago
I'm working at an early stage startup, so for me there is no "long term"; a few weeks spent fixing the problems with our onboarding process are a few weeks where we miss out on the two or three customers who might make/break our next funding round.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  And clearly this isn't addressed to you. When you scale up, you should invest in onboarding. Until then, you shouldn't.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    …I asked the question, lol
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      I was kind of trying to answering it. Your original post said > Onboarding is hard. How are you supposed to do it? Everyone who has to go through it isn’t going to fix it, because they’re new and have their actual job to get to. When you hit a certain scale, it will in fact be someone's actual job to build a system to onboard people (not necessarily full time). Onboarding is both hard and expensive, and right now your onboarding is probably "here's a computer and a JIRA, etc login. Our standup tomorrow is at X, here's some documentation and see if you can address small problem by then. John's been assigned to answer your questions". Which is fine. But at some point you're going to have enough moving parts that it's worth paying someone to build an onboarding process. And it will probably have cringey humor and waste new hires time to some degree. I'm not sure if there's great onboarding systems or generic advice for smaller teams because they're so individual to the company and the cost of making a more formal process probably outweighs the cost of just having an engineer do it by hand the few times you're doing it. As you said, you have other, more pressing, issues. Good luck! I hope you get those customers to get (good terms on) your next round.

TameAntelope 5y ago

I'm working at an early stage startup, so for me there is no "long term"; a few weeks spent fixing the problems with our onboarding process are a few weeks where we miss out on the two or three customers who might make/break our next funding round.

HWR_14 5y ago
And clearly this isn't addressed to you. When you scale up, you should invest in onboarding. Until then, you shouldn't.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  …I asked the question, lol
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    I was kind of trying to answering it. Your original post said > Onboarding is hard. How are you supposed to do it? Everyone who has to go through it isn’t going to fix it, because they’re new and have their actual job to get to. When you hit a certain scale, it will in fact be someone's actual job to build a system to onboard people (not necessarily full time). Onboarding is both hard and expensive, and right now your onboarding is probably "here's a computer and a JIRA, etc login. Our standup tomorrow is at X, here's some documentation and see if you can address small problem by then. John's been assigned to answer your questions". Which is fine. But at some point you're going to have enough moving parts that it's worth paying someone to build an onboarding process. And it will probably have cringey humor and waste new hires time to some degree. I'm not sure if there's great onboarding systems or generic advice for smaller teams because they're so individual to the company and the cost of making a more formal process probably outweighs the cost of just having an engineer do it by hand the few times you're doing it. As you said, you have other, more pressing, issues. Good luck! I hope you get those customers to get (good terms on) your next round.