This is the onboarding I used for a senior product analyst who started on the data team in 2022. I typically add the person’s name in the title of the document, add a fun image personalized to them in the Notion header, and then make it public so that others can see what this person will be working on (and can help as they get stuck / reach out for questions) and can see what others have done for prior onboarding documents.

I’ve been in environments where you want someone to learn your systems and tools by contributing code week 1. HubSpot used that onboarding model for its engineering new hires, and worked well as they brought in large classes of new hires starting on the same day. 

That is not what I was going for with this new hire. I didn’t have time to write up an onboarding project, construct a simple PR they could work on, and then work with them closely as they worked through it. 

This feels representative of a scrappy, fast moving startup where your documentation, processes, tools, and projects all change rapidly. I was comfortable that we had hired someone who was comfortable reading our documentation and getting themself up to speed fairly independently.

This is an important doc that is shared company wide that covers things like our deep work philosophy, setting up your workstation, setting up your calendar, our company meeting cadence, vacation policies, etc. Reforge is fairly opinionated about how to do well in a remote first culture, and deep work is a core principle of that. It can be something that is novel to people at first.

We have a great amount of documentation that we produce regularly that talks about our company goals, progress, changes, and plans for the future. I find it incredibly helpful to new hires (and it makes it easy for me) to be able to link to these documents to quickly bring someone up to speed. In prior companies I had to spend many hours in front of a white board talking through these details, but it’s always nicely organized in our company wiki.

I try to prioritize the people they’ll meet with based on whether they’re on their team and people they’ll be working with. If we were in an office I’d take someone around and introduce them to their coworkers but in a remote-first company it’s important to set the expectation that they should be meeting with people frequently and should not hesitate to reach out over slack. 

I always think back to one of my own personal experiences where I joined a company and didn’t know any of the people sitting around me in our office. My manager didn’t introduce me to them, and I was too shy / intimidated to go around and introduce myself.

 I think it’s especially important at a remote first company to empower people to feel like they must speak with others, give them a long list of names to get started, and encourage them to reach out to others not on the list.

This is always a key question people forget to ask when they’re getting started.

I always make it a point to ask the new hire to give me a sense of their summary of the feedback. I do it to make sure they’ve done it, to show to them that I think it’s important, and to push on their understanding of our customers. 

Companies that lose touch of customer feedback and perspective will fail. For an analyst who may not interact 1:1 with that many customers, it’s important for them to start to develop their own intuition about where there are opportunities to investigate in data analysis.

I’m always surprised how poorly employees know their own products. You have to know your own product if you want to be able to form hypotheses for what is driving behavior and different outcomes for customers.

In a perfect world someone would ship a PR with a small change in their first week. I didn’t have the time to help someone with that, so I tried to front-load this onboarding plan with learning context about the company so they could apply that understanding to metrics, tools, key paths, etc.

Dan Wolchonok

I created this artifact for onboarding a Senior Product Analyst in 2022. I personalize it for each team member and make it public so that others can see what this person will focus on when they start. 

Welcome to Reforge! We're so excited to have you join us. You're jumping into a rapidly growing and evolving company and I am certain that before you know it you'll start adding value, owning difficult problems, and directly contributing to our success.

We've broken up the document into 3 weeks: 

Each week has an overarching objective so that you can know what is expected at the conclusion of the week:

 The purpose of your first week of onboarding is to familiarize yourself with the tools we use internally, team and history, the company background, who our members are, and the goals and priorities of the marketing team.

 After making sure you're all set up week 1, you should be ready to start familiarizing yourself with the Reforge product and more team-specific content. Understanding team goals and how you fit within those and learning more about the business itself.

 Week three is all about starting to contribute to marketing in a meaningful way. You're already plugged in, but the context and knowledge you've built up over the first two weeks will allow you to start contributing data insights.

This onboarding document is intended to guide your first few weeks. It's your document, so feel free to modify/add/alter it to best fit your needs. 

 within each week it is up to you to ensure you get through everything in advance of the meeting it corresponds with

*.*** If you have any questions about it, don't hesitate to reach out to me on Slack 🙂

The purpose of your first week of onboarding is to familiarize yourself with the tools we use internally, our insights team history, the company background, and who our members are.

In this section, you'll review the various tools we use, get an understanding of how we treat remote work, and also get your calendar and messaging platforms established. If you have questions at any point, jot them down and talk through them with Michael.   

Block off your "deep work" time on your calendar

💡 You can browse all channels, but I tried to highlight some of the more relevant ones here

#analytics: The public home of data at Reforge

#data-internal: The data team's private slack channel

#metaplane-alerts: Our data observability platform's alerts

 Slack Susan Blake if you want to be added to our weekly yoga invite. Slack Justin Thrift if you are interesting in Book Club (both are a fun way to meet Reforgers not on your team 😊).

Recurring Meetings that should be on your calendar (Click Toggle To View) 

Team Sync, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 12pm PT: Full Reforge company meeting to get everyone on the same page and learn more about each other

The data team is the "department" that Product Analysts belong to. In this section, you'll have the opportunity to learn a bit about who is on the team, review where we started and where we are today.

Review team members and add yourself to the directory found here: Data Team

The most updated org chart can be found via your Gusto portal

Fill out your 1:1 Question Guide by the end of the week:

The company is young, but growing very quickly. One of the things that makes Reforge awesome is that we set goals and hypotheses, but regularly revisit those things to ensure we are still aligned and on track. In this section, you'll be able to understand why we exist but also see how we're thinking about right now as well as the next 6-18 months. Brian regularly does new hire meetings to allow folks to hear about the company from his perspective and ask questions. Look for him to post about one of these (likely in Slack) and get on the invite.

Review the latest notes from our recent board meetings:

October 2021 Board Meeting - Team Version

Start setting up "Getting to know you" meetings with the following team members. These are 30-minute zoom meetings designed to:

Learn what other people on the team do, who they are, what makes them tick, and any fun facts they have (ask them for other recommendations of others to speak with as well!).

What are your current goals and priorities?

What would you do if you were in my shoes?

What should I learn about Reforge that will be helpful to me in my role?

Feel free to move people around between weeks if helpful for scheduling.

Our members are the lifeblood of our company. Without them, we don't have a business. So hearing from their perspective is super valuable for us to understand. After we run a live cohort, we always conduct an NPS survey as a way to hear from members. In this section, you'll have a chance to learn about NPS and then see how our members talk about Reforge.

Read through raw feedback versus analysis to help you form your own opinion. The goal is to identify key insights of things participants like and things participants want to improve.

If needed, Click here to learn more about NPS

 Peruse our Forum to see the types of questions our participants are asking

Review the 2021 Spring Feedback and review the Spring 2021 End of Program Survey Summary document to see the analysis we did on the previous cohort and key takeaways.

Go through the growth series, specifically the modules on retention and growth models. If you have limited time:

Review this module recap for growth models: 

Get a product overview. These 3 resources might be a helpful to start for giving you a general sense of the product: 

Get a marketing overview (watch this recording first)

Read the intro the martech tools: Intro to Martech Tools

Get plugged into finance modeling project 

Attend meetings with Caroline and Andrew to kick off project

Get access to the materials Kristi has created / we’ve modeled to enable finance so far

In week 2, you'll shift from learning about the company and team and get into the Reforge content itself. You'll have the chance to act like a member and learn about Retention, Engagement, and Acquisition.

1. Getting familiar with the data team's tools

Watch this recording: Data Intro Overview

Watch this recording: Amplitude Overview for Product Team

Watch this recording: Application Data Walkthrough

Read this documentation: Segment Documentation

Read this documentation: Iterable Documentation

Read this documentation: Intro to Martech Tools

Look at the fields available in Segment here

Read about Metabase Overview (Our BI Tool)

Key metrics to understand patterns of behavior on: —> how do we make money, how would you describe that? What's the narrative of how the business runs?

Product Analyst Onboarding at Reforge

🌎 Introduction

🗜️ Week 1

Objective:

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