Onboarding quickly as a manager, a suggested heuristic

Ramping up quickly is crucial. Assuming a two-year tenure for an Individual Contributor (IC) or a Manager, there's a significant cost associated with delivering value late. For example, a five-month delay in an engineer providing value (half a year vs. a month) can result in 20% of their tenure being lost, which is costly.

Regarding onboarding, I suggest the 'first-week-heuristic' with action items for a new manager's first week:

1. Discard all previous plans made for the role. They are irrelevant until you are integrated within the organization.

2. Meet with your direct manager to understand the most crucial focus area. Then, break down the focus into the categories of People, Tech, and Product, assigning percentages to where you should spend the most time.

3. Take ownership from day one: Do not wait to 'learn' and 'observe.' Start onboarding by doing, making the process iterative rather than linear (Thanks, Gilad).

4. Meet with your team and apply the Boz algorithm recursively (Thanks, Gilad):
   4.1. Ask the team to tell you everything they think you should know.
   4.2. Inquire about the biggest current challenges.
   4.3. Find out who else you should talk to.
   4.4. Write everything down and repeat with any names provided in 4.3.

5. Define two 'effort' vectors and pursue them in parallel:

   • A 'delivery' effort for immediate actions you need to take.
   • A 'learning' effort for things you need to understand next.

6. Break down the efforts from point 5 into a Jira Story with sub-tasks for both 'delivery' and 'learning,' then prioritize and start executing. This provides transparency for both your team and your direct manager.

7. Open a Google Doc and note everything that 'bothers' you or requires action. Most items won't need immediate action but are worth noting to alleviate mental burden.

What I value most is step 4:

• From 4.1, you can quickly identify 'controversial' items or issues that bother the team and require action.
• From 4.2, you can identify 'quick wins' to make an impact quickly.
• From 4.3, you can discern who is more influential within the organization and team, which usually takes a long time to assess.