The walkthrough assignment I give a senior hire in week 2, what I asked her day-to-day lead to stop doing, and how her arrival revived a dead stand-up.
Week 1 with a new hire is the questions (I wrote them up in Issue 22). Week 2 with our new mobile designer was the map, and I want to share the 3 moves because they’re the same for any senior hire walking into a product with more surface area than anyone can hold in their head.
The walkthrough assignment. I told her the most important thing she can do over the next couple of months is understand the broader ecosystem of features, and the way I want her to do it is by reaching out directly to each of my design leads across the product areas and asking for a high-level walkthrough. Inside each one, call out what’s on mobile and what isn’t. If a lead can’t do it, they can attach someone senior on their team. I gave her the order and the reasons, because the order is the lesson: billing first, since those are the most complex flows she’ll inherit and the lead there has the most context; the design system second, because anything shared, anything multiple teams need to touch, is going to converge into one experience and mobile will connect to it; the rest as she sees fit, important but not as urgent. And a shortcut: every lead did a vision-and-goals exercise earlier this year, so there’s probably a deck, and if not the Figma files are fine. The point is she builds the map herself by asking for it, and every line on it is a person she’s now met.
The lead, not the manager. Her day-to-day lead isn’t her manager, which is a pairing I like and one that needs tending. I asked him how his cadence with her looked, so I’d know how much he’s doing versus how much I need to do: a weekly hour, a PM and design sync, and daily check-ins this first week, which is natural and shouldn’t be the long-term shape. Then the reminder I’d give any lead pairing with a senior hire: don’t be shy about removing things from your plate completely and letting her run them. Being too close to it will hurt, and trust with new people is hard to build if you never hand them a whole thing. She’s senior, she’s talented, she’s eager, so give her as much as you can so you can take it easy. We’re also starting a weekly with the 3 of us, in this order: a human check-in, feedback in both directions, then the work. Feedback in front of the lead is a feature, since it keeps me honest and keeps him in the loop without a second meeting, and anything sensitive waits until we’re alone.
Give her as much as you can, so you can take it easy.
Reprogramming a dead ritual. The mobile squad had a cross-functional sync that died last year, and I was in the version that died: cameras off, nobody spoke, one person read a document aloud for 30 minutes. It got cancelled because there was nothing to go over, which is what happens when a meeting has no shape. The time zones weren’t the cause; we checked. The relaunch uses her arrival as the excuse. The first 15 minutes are her 6-minute intro talk plus casual introductions around the room, the second 15 are what’s in motion so she’s up to speed, and the engineer runs it rather than the PM, which her lead suggested so it’s “here are the projects, who needs support” instead of a reading. If we do it well, it sticks. We just have to use our brains and reprogram it a little.
A bonus from her first work review. She brought a payment methods flow with a list of open questions attached (nickname truncation, what happens to a default when the card expires, whether adding a method launches straight into the processor’s form or offers a choice first) and the tension she’s carrying, which she put as “how much can I break versus how much should be retained, because I don’t have the full context.” That’s the right question to be asking in week 2. My one catch on the work: card and bank transfer often carry different processing fees, and not disclosing that difference in the UI is an anti-pattern we’d get called out for. And one hierarchy nit: the “default” badge matters less than the card brand icon, so stack them on the left and give the number the room.