Onboarding in technical teams with Angad Singh

Conversations · Self-Management, Startups

This is a summary largely taken for my own reference, and may contain errors. Mistakes are mine, credit for the good stuff is entirely Angad’s

Keywords

Team Management, Technical Processes, Onboarding

Angad’s background

Angad works at Twitter as a Senior Engineering Manager. He currently leads the Consumer Data Engineering Team - a globally distributed team that builds and owns datasets, metrics and data products for all core product areas. Angad has a lot of experience in building and growing teams, and is extremely believable on the topic.

When building a team from scratch

At the start, you can't follow a playbook. Need to build strong personal relationships with the people in your team. Always start with that. You have to be a leader that your team will follow and respect along the way – not just for your technical chops, but for the person you are.

For a very small team, you haven't yet reached the critical point where you need to invest in ensuring that everyone knows what’s going on. As long as the vision is clear, and it’s clear how the team’s targets map to the vision, you’re good to go.

Managing people

The way you manage people depends a lot on their seniority (defined by the amount of handholding they require). If someone needs a lot of coaching and handholding to do their job well, invest loads of 1:1 time with them at the start.

If someone doesn’t really need coaching, just focus on ensuring that they have as much context as possible on the problem. With them, half your problems are solved. They can take care of the "how" to do it. But need to be very aligned on vision

Regardless of seniority, your team must be drinking from your firehose a dozen times a day when it comes to vision and process. Make those crystal clear.

Defining scope and setting targets

Targets must easily map to what the bigger vision is. While you can’t split the vision (i.e., you can’t share half the vision with half the people), you can make sure that people see the vision when working on micro, timeboxes tasks.

Onboarding people

There is technical onboarding and there is vision onboarding. Both are super important.

Technical Onboarding

  • Do really solid documentation that engineers and designers can read through. But also make it obvious how they can search through it
    • Added note by Rishabh: if using notion, explicit list on your wiki’s root page that they can use Cmd+k to search
  • Do loads of recording of code and process walkthroughs. Very useful as long as the content does not change much. This is particularly useful when different people have different start days
  • Create a list of day 0 onbaording documents, and giving them a day or two to get used to things

Vision Onboarding

  • Best done with a combination of 1:1 chats (to energize people and answer their questions) and writing documents (easier for them to refer back to minutiae)