This is part 3 of the "onboarding done right" series, if you've missed the first two articles talking about onboarding into vision and customer understanding, then you can read them here: PART 1 and here PART 2.

Today I'll briefly touch on ToDos to understand any available product metrics. Remember, this onboarding series is for early-stage teams and that means everyone should understand and buy into what metrics you're tracking, which are important ones and which they can influence or support.

The product metrics will (obviously) be very dependent on the type of product you're building. Here I will give you some hints from a SaaS product perspective - which is the most common situation these days.

Dashboards and Analytics

The first order of business should be -> get access to existing metrics dashboards. It's great if a company actually has a dashboard of things they consider important (for onchain and offchain) and everyone can access it and see it regularly. Even better if they see how their work moved some metric in a positive direction.

if you're not joining the business side of the house then you should ask someone to just walk you through the main metrics and what influences them. You should also try to figure out how your work is represented in any of them.

If you're joining business side of things then get access to the full analytics stack that (hopefully) covers full customer journey incl. funnel (it almost never does, but you can try):

in-product data,
marketing channels data,
website and docs
other platforms (like discords, TG, Slack, etc.)

Don't leave your docs site without analytics. It might be telling to see what are the most frequented areas of interest.

Make sure you understand data events and structure, naming, level of abstraction etc...this must be shared and used across all teams consistently. Especially if you're joining a team with longer history - this is super important.

If you have data by new user signup cohort, by type of account, by type of company, by activation event, by frequency of specific activities, by feature, by acquisition channel, by new / resurrected user - then use them to understand the experience funnel and all stage conversion metrics.

If you have limited data, at least try to understand basic usage and retention metrics or see what could exist and can be created easily and go make it happen. Today, there are nocode tools for almost everything. Unless there's some sort of strange privacy obsession on your part then you should absolutely be tracking what's happening with your product and customers. Of course, be transparent about it and use it in non-evil way to improve your product and business. That's in the mutual interest of you and your users anyway.

What I'm saying, you don't have to use Google Analytics but you should absolutely use some comprehensive analytics. As they say - you would not want to be on the flight with blind pilot without navigation equipment.

Quick Wins List

One extra step I recommend to everyone is to ask your new joiner to make a list of possible Quick Win improvements. As they're going through the onboarding, as you introduce them to different parts of the project, team, metrics, as they go through the data, ask them to make a list of questions and possible improvement they see.

These can be potential quick wins in:

Product changes / experiments
Process / ways of working
Existing Customer Referrals
Expansion within Existing Customers

And get the team together after 2-3 weeks to hear these and to discuss them. Do not criticise, just discuss the observations and focus on potential experiments that may come out of it.

Many of potential quick wins are typically not doable or were tried, or there's some missing piece of context that makes them "not so quick" but this exercise gives your newcomers as well as the team the reason to think about everything from the fresh perspective and without bias.

You might be surprised how often there will be something to act on and something to learn from.

Github Onboarding Issue for you to copy

Just in case you're one of the technical teams that are using Github for everything, I've used it for recent onboarding with Distributed.Press team and created generic Issue you can copy and customize for your team and circumstances. Find it here: Comprehensive Sample Onboarding Checklist For New Team Members (early-stage projects)

And this marks the end of onboarding triple. If it sparked any questions and suggestions for your own onboarding process, I'm glad. If not, I'm sorry you've wasted time to get to the end of it

Next week, I'm going look at one of the most common & fatal missing parts on distribution side of things that cause many early stage projects to burn and fail. And I have seen it across number of early-stage projects I worked with in the past 5 years again and again.

Let's connect - find me as BFG (stands for BrightFutureGuy)
- on Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/bfg
- on X: https://twitter.com/aka_BFG

And join the FC channel to meet other builders who want to do it better: https://warpcast.com/~/channel/buildbetter