My learnings onboarding remotely as an Engineering Manager

Day 1 of 2021 in beautiful Tahoe

Two months into my journey as new a manager, I have had the opportunity to witness some critical moments for my team.

• Environment changes: An ongoing pandemic, a high profile election, an acquisition and an insurrection.
• Process changes: A code freeze that was followed by the institution of a change advisory board with synchronous reviews for critical changes.
• Stress inducers: Some incidents that my team was involved in, general slowness due to the above causing heavy context switches and slow downs.

With the unsaid challenge of fully remotely meeting a new team, learning processes that exists, learning the engineering domain of a complex successful critical product; this journey has been quite an interesting one.

A couple of things helped me focus regardless.

1. Have a to-do list on your first day

I started with a list of 5 items.

• Meet my Manager via Zoom and setup recurring 1:1s.
• Meet my Onboarding Buddy (or ask for one) via Slack and setup 1:1s.
• Submit documentation needed for work authorization and payroll.
• Say hi to the team and mention that you will be setting up zoom meetings with them as the week progresses.
• Start my Onboarding tasks and laptop setup.

This allowed me to check those items off and get the serotonin rush of doing so.

As I look at the document today, it has 432 items out of which 401 items are marked complete!

2. Grow your network

Meet people.

This is very important especially for a fully remote onboarding experience. I prioritized the people to meet in the first week as follows:

• Meet everyone on the team informally and get to know each other and what is top of mind for them.
• Meet all my peer managers in the same org.
• Meet all directors in the same org, VP of org and CTO.

Send a note in Slack with an introduction and mention that you’d like to chat and you can find a time that works well. During the meetings, ask about who they would recommend I meet with in relation to the work my team does or the interactions my team has. Zoom fatigue is real but it’s worth it.

Add to the list. Schedule meetings. Repeat.

3. Identify quantifiable areas where you can be impactful

I joined really close to an annual promotion cycle and quarterly planning, I ensured that my top two priorities were:

1. What: Identify who is ready for promotion and begin gathering information by learning about the projects they have worked on. This can be done using history on Slack, Github and JIRA.
   Impact: This is important to ensure that a manager change doesn’t short change someone on the team that is ready for a promotion.
2. What: Identify and document tasks or requests that need to be prioritized, goals outside of the team as it applies to the team, goals of sister teams and ideas that the team mentions in conversation.
   Impact: This is critical to effective planning and helping the team when they are already stressed due to the factors mentioned at the start of the post.

My mantra: Do a few things everyday and do them well.

I have been gifted with a technically stellar and high functioning team, who have already made this journey a bright one so far and I look forward to reflecting at the end of the year.