How to onboard designers when you’re scaling at hyperspeed

First step, alleviate information overload

Onboarding at a new company can take many forms. For established design organizations like Apple and Airbnb, onboarding might take the form of a multi-week boot camp where new hires receive a crash course in the organization’s structure, business models, company history, culture, and more. On the other end of the spectrum, for example at a small startup, new employees might be given a laptop, a hoodie, some upcoming deadlines, and a handshake for good luck.

Whatever form an onboarding process takes, its potential impact is critical. In fact, according to research from Glassdoor, organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82%, and productivity by over 70%. Companies that don’t properly onboard new hires are more likely to lose those employees within the first year — costing valuable time, money, and morale.

Developing a design onboarding process

As a mid-sized startup in hyper-growth mode, Faire falls somewhere between the two extreme ends of the spectrum. We wouldn’t onboard new hires with a handshake and a hoodie, but neither do we have the resources to produce an intensive design onboarding program in addition to the company-wide “Founders Bootcamp” that all Faire new hires experience.

We needed to develop a design team onboarding process that would preserve our unique culture and values, and create a sense of belonging, while also enabling new design team hires to scale quickly. So, we took a design approach like we did with redesigning Faire’s interview process, and started to test and refine a new design onboarding process.

Amy Mako, Faire’s Design Operations founder, led the project, partnering with Design Manager Zhen Zeng. Starting in March 2021, Amy and Zhen launched the three-month project, where we interviewed 18 designers over two weeks, gathered feedback, and designed iteratively. We mapped out new hire and stakeholder needs across their onboarding journey and identified key gaps and opportunities for improvement. Some of the pain points we uncovered were: new hires’ feelings of overwhelm, their desire to start contributing quickly, and an eagerness to get up to speed on Faire’s business, products, customers, and ways of working.

At the end of the day, we uncovered a mountain of new opportunities — but with limited bandwidth, we needed to be intentional about focusing on elements with the largest impact. What follows are three design opportunities we identified and some of the core processes, tools, and protocols we built to address them. We hope these are helpful to other fast-growing design teams as they develop and refine their own onboarding journeys.

Alleviate information overload

One of the first challenges we identified in our research were feelings of overload that many designers have when stepping into a new role at any company.

“The main thing we heard was that new hires felt a strong sense of overwhelm,” Amy explains. “Faire’s business is complex. A designer coming in needs to have an understanding of both sides of the wholesale marketplace, they need to learn our business model, and they need to grow their empathy for our users all at once,” she says.

Yet, we discovered a disconnect between what new hires think they need to know immediately and how quickly they’re actually expected to get up to speed. “We learned that it was a largely self-imposed pressure,” Amy explains. Walking into a fast-paced, high-performing environment where teams are shipping new features every week, new hires feel a lot of internalized pressure to be able to contribute and make an impact immediately.

Our solution was to strategically pace the amount of information a new hire is exposed to, which is communicated through an individualized Onboarding Guide. Essentially, this document maps out a new hire’s first four weeks at Faire, with a defined checklist of items to complete on Day 1, Week 1, Week 2, and so on. For example, Day 1 includes items like “Set up your Google Calendar” and “Have first your 1:1 with your manager.” This format sets clear expectations on what a new hire should learn and do by each benchmark. Links to resources are only shared at relevant moments so that new hires don’t get overwhelmed and can grow their understanding of Faire’s business, products, and customers at a sustainable pace. This speed and structure is something we spent a lot of time exploring in the redesign process.

Recent product design hire Brittany Hoffman appreciated how key information was shared thoughtfully in her Onboarding Guide. She explains, “As opposed to just company-wide information, or team information, it felt very curated for me and my role in particular. Instead of getting overwhelmed by so much information, I was able to focus on just what I needed to know at that moment.”

Build confidence and ownership

The Onboarding Guide is designed to get new hires up to speed quickly in a way that inspires confidence and encourages ownership. We do this in two ways — first, by ensuring a new hire’s path is self-directed, and second, by helping them achieve a “quick win” with their Starter Project.

Each Onboarding Guide is built from a template in Notion, Faire’s digital knowledge base, making it easy for employees to reference past information and move at a self-directed pace. “The Onboarding Guide we give new hires is just a guide — how they consume it is up to them. We’re creating a sense of ownership, which is one of our company values,” Amy explains.

Chris Lopez, a Senior Brand Designer who previously worked at Apple, AKQA, and TBWA\Chiat\Day before joining Faire, explained, “I love that there’s a checklist where I can just dig around to find the answer for myself. It gives me more autonomy and allows me to mentally prepare ahead of time. I can organize my day how I want to, while still getting everything done.”

Another way we help employees grow their confidence is through the Starter Project, a tightly-scoped first project designed to help the employee get familiar with Faire’s product and customers. Tasks in the Onboarding Guide get more complex as the designer progresses and ladder up to their Starter Project. It’s a way to ensure employees can make a contribution within their first month, while being set up for success long-term.

Zhen sums it up: “You only onboard someone once, so having that experience be positive and informative is more valuable than what you might glean from asking someone to immediately dive into projects.”

Integrate new hires into your culture

At a large company, onboarding can easily become impersonal and generic. To counteract this, we focus on ways to bring new hires into the Faire design community through personal, human touches — which also help onboard them to our team culture and ways of working.

For example, we pull what we learn throughout the candidate interview process to suggest Slack channels (#doggos, #fairents, #culture, and more) for a new hire when they join. Also, before their first day, their manager sends a “why we hired you” email, expressing how excited the team is to have them join. It’s a small gesture that goes a long way in making new hires feel welcome — and valued. It’s also an opportunity for us to highlight their strengths and let them know how we see them making an impact at the company.

Next, each new hire on the Design Team is matched with an official onboarding buddy for the duration of their onboarding process. Each buddy joins a daily stand down, where new hires are invited to ask any questions they might have. This ritual fosters a sense of trust and helps new hires learn about Faire’s culture and community, in addition to standard work questions. “Not that I’m scared or intimidated to talk with my manager, but it’s easier to ask questions to someone who’s also a peer,” Chris explains.

The buddy relationship extends beyond a daily Q&A, too. Currently, Amy and the team are piloting more formal shadow programs where new hires will follow their buddy on a user interview, or even work with them on a paired design exercise in Figma — an idea we borrowed from Faire’s Engineering Team, which has new hires get up to speed through paired programming exercises. It’s a great way to familiarize new hires with our design system and processes without throwing them into the deep end right away.

Onboarding, ongoing

Today, we’re continuing to refine our onboarding process by sending surveys and tracking results throughout a new hire’s ramp-up period. As Faire continues to grow, our onboarding process will evolve, too. However, our end goal will remain the same: to continue finding ways to meet new hires’ needs for information, community, and belonging.

“If we focus on an individual’s needs when onboarding, they will create value for the organization,” Amy explains. “We’re already hiring experts in their discipline — we just need to get the right information in their hands, and they’ll grow the business from there.”

Today, our current onboarding process works for exactly where we are — a mid-size team in hyper-growth, trying to strike the right balance between structure and flexibility, and continuously looking for ways to help new hires get started doing what they do best, sooner.