One of my favorite aspects of working at Tadaweb was the opportunity to make an impact not just through Product Design, but in other initiatives that impacted the company culture.
Employee Onboarding
Challenge
Tadaweb was growing rapidly. However, our old onboarding process could not meet our growing needs. Key steps were not well documented, not standardized, or non-existent. Onboarding procedures were largely manual and assigned to team members whose plates were already full. Ultimately, new team members felt they couldn’t become productive quickly enough, and existing team members felt they supported new members for far longer than anticipated.
How I helped
I helped our People Operations Team use Design Thinking methods to craft a better onboarding experience. Together, we:
- Created a ‘newcomer journey map’ to capture needs, pains, blindspots, and opportunities.
- Identified areas for better delegation, automation, and efficiency.
- Brainstormed approaches to ensure the newcomer would be well-informed without feeling overwhelmed.
Outcomes
We created a robust, yet lightweight, onboarding process that:
- Laid out key information each newcomer needed to know.
- Progressively revealed information about the market, company, team, product, and role.
- Was accessible to all stakeholders in a single place.
- Could be easily replicated and customized according to the team and role.
- Still allowed the human-centric, interpersonal culture of the company to shine through.
In mid-2021, we ran a pilot with the new onboarding process and then iterated on it based on feedback. Tadaweb still uses an improved version of this onboarding process in 2024.
Quarterly Post-mortem
Challenge
In Q1 2023, the entire Product & Engineering departments in Tadaweb came together to work on a single initiative that spanned the entire platform architecture. Multiple feature teams planned, collaborated, and executed on a very tight deadline. Not only was this an ambitious project, it was an internal experiment meant to challenge the Product & Engineering departments to think and work in new ways.
How I helped
So we wouldn’t miss the valuable lessons and takeaways from this initiative, I organized and conducted a virtual Post-mortem workshop which included feedback from 3 different departments.
As soon as the initiative was complete, I collected quantitative data from Product Managers, Designers, Engineers, Customer Support, and Heads of Departments on wins, challenges, blindspots, and ideas. I shared this feedback with key decision-makers from all the relevant departments. We synthesized the feedback and prioritized the biggest areas of improvement.
Outcomes
The workshop offered a safe way for tactical teams to share their critical feedback with leadership, and for leaders to offer praise and motivation to the tactical teams. It also allowed us to talk about the experience while it was fresh in our minds, and use that momentum to identify immediate next steps to improve.
