A 30‑day onboarding pilot that actually ships
Most onboarding initiatives fail because they try to “fix onboarding” in general.
That becomes:
- big documentation projects
- new tools nobody adopts
- more meetings
- and the same day‑to‑day interruptions
If you want visible impact in 30 days, run a short pilot that ships fixes into a single workflow.
The setup: pick one workflow (not a theme)
Choose the workflow that causes the most repeat pings today:
- deploys and rollbacks
- “where do I look?” triage for alerts
- a common migration or backfill
- on-call basics (first 15 minutes)
Short version: make the “right answer” easy to find inside the workflow.
What makes a good pilot target
- At least 5 repeat questions a week.
- One primary owner team who can fix the gaps.
- A workflow that touches real production behavior (not just a doc issue).
30‑day arc (at a glance)
Week 1 Baseline + scope
Week 2 Capture reusable answers
Week 3 Ship runbook/tooling upgrades
Week 4 Review outcomes + pick next workflow
Week 1: baseline and scope
Collect the raw questions. Look at Slack threads, standup notes, and recent incidents. You want the actual phrasing engineers use.
Pick the top 15–25 repeats. Don’t overthink it. Pick the ones that keep showing up.
Define what “good” looks like. For a workflow, that usually means:
- ownership is clear
- the right links are one click away
- there are a few safe “first checks”
- there’s a known escalation path
Week 2: capture reusable answers (small on purpose)
For each repeat question, capture a small, reusable entry:
- Owner: team + escalation channel
- Source links: runbook, dashboards, repo paths, deploy history
- First checks: 3–5 quick things to verify
- Safe next step: what’s low-risk to try first
Keep these short. If it turns into a doc rewrite, you drifted.
Week 3: ship upgrades into runbooks and tooling
Now turn the captured answers into improvements that stick:
- add missing runbook steps (especially “first checks” and verification)
- add missing dashboard links and saved queries
- clarify ownership in the places engineers look first (README, on-call docs, service catalog)
- create a single “where to start” entry for the workflow
If something is repeatedly confusing, treat it like a product bug and ship a fix.
Week 4: review outcomes and set the next loop
At the end of the month, you should be able to answer:
- What repeat questions dropped?
- What escalations still happened, and why?
- What did we ship (runbooks, dashboards, ownership)?
- What’s the next workflow worth tackling?
This is the exec‑friendly part: a crisp readout you can share without creating a ceremony.
Expected outputs (realistic)
- 10–20 reusable answers with owners and source links.
- 2–4 runbook or dashboard fixes.
- One short readout with before/after signals.
What to measure (team-level)
Don’t measure individuals. Measure the system.
Good pilot signals:
- repeat questions per week for the workflow
- “who owns this?” pings
- time-to-unblock (rough, directional)
- number of runbook/ownership fixes shipped
It’s not about fewer questions. It’s about each question making onboarding calmer next month.
Where DawnOps fits
DawnOps is built to run this loop continuously: answer in chat with owners + source links + first checks, then save the answer so the team can reuse it.
If you want to run a pilot like this with one team, start with a workflow and a list of repeat questions. That’s enough to begin.