How Maria designed an onboarding that shapes strategically confident designers
Maria is the Director of Product Design at Roadmunk, a Toronto-based company with the goal of making roadmapping quick, effective, and collaborative across an entire organization. We talked to her about how she uses business tools to onboard new designers in order to make them valuable and independent contributors to the company from day one.
By Maria Pereda, d.MBA alum
In my view, the traditional onboarding process is very limited. New employees usually learn where to find documents and how processes work. Designers are often also asked to conduct the product’s usability assessments and that is where the process usually ends. All of that is mostly done in a vacuum, based on new hires existing knowledge of users and usability. But what company or industry knowledge do you really have at that stage?
I believe that traditional onboarding does not set up new team members for success.
The reality is that designers increasingly have a seat at the table and that design is considered a strategic function. But how can you be strategic if you don’t understand the full context of a company? So, I decided to create an onboarding process that empowers my team to have strategic conversations from the get-go.
To create this onboarding process, I borrowed some concepts and business tools that we learned at the d.MBA and supplemented it with the company resources. The onboarding process takes two weeks and is broken into daily tasks.
In week one, new hires go through industry and competitor research. The goal is to conclude the week by creating a Blue Ocean Strategy offer for Roadmunk. I want them to get familiar with competitors and also understand why users choose them instead of us.
In week two, they conduct a strategic evaluation of Roadmunk. They begin the week with a summary of week one. The goal is to identify the most promising design and business opportunities. After that, new hires talk to the customer experience team, user support, and sales. This gives them an internal view of different departments, which compliments their recently acquired market knowledge by supplementing it with a thorough internal overview. They conclude the onboarding by drawing conclusions from both weeks and by presenting opportunities to the whole design team.
I have now onboarded five new hires with this system and it works really well. New designers on the team learn quickly who is who in the company, familiarize themselves with the industry, product, and business. This is the process that usually takes months, not days or two weeks.
This onboarding process enables new hires to independently have strategic conversations in their very first project.
I see that it really boosts my team’s confidence and extends their circle of influence. I feel like we are really growing future design leaders here. And this is what I want to do. I want my team members to be the director or the VP one day and I want to prepare them for that future.