Entering the orbit: the importance of easing the onboarding process

Oskar shares his experience starting in the UX team at Dynatrace

I've just joined Dynatrace as a Product Experience Designer, and I need to share my thoughts about the onboarding experience with you. To describe it best, let me use a simple analogy that most of us could relate to: Imagine you need a new mobile phone. After weeks of research, you decided to buy a mobile device with a completely different OS from the one you currently have. Your old phone contains a lot of stuff after years of using it. After unpacking your shiny new device, hours of manually migrating files, contacts, and settings await you.

Think about a similar but slightly different experience: you decided to upgrade and stay with the same OS. So, you purchased a new iPhone – here, the experience is much more pleasant. The configuration wizard helps you move all your files, contacts, apps, etc. You feel like you're being cared for!

This second example is the experience that Dynatrace is aiming for!

At Dynatrace, we're working on complex and professional software used by engineering professionals that keeps millions of apps continuously working. Just as well, the onboarding process is designed to be as smooth as possible.

In this blog post, I'll share my experience with the onboarding process at Dynatrace and why I believe a great onboarding experience is essential for every company.

Design enablement process

While joining a new company, there are many things that you have to learn and do from the very beginning. Remembering all the people and everything that needs to be done is like drinking from a firehose. It's impossible to manage many things at once; even the ancient Romans knew that. They coined the motto "divide et impera" meaning divide and rule, which applies to everything surrounding us. The only way to deal with complex problems is by dividing them into smaller, manageable tasks.

And that's the unique thing about onboarding in the design team at Dynatrace. Our Design Enablement Specialist ensures that all these cumbersome tasks become as easy as possible, creating a nice-to-do list with everything that needs to be done and helping with go-to people and links for most needed spaces on SharePoint. I can't count how many times I had to reference this list when I wanted to see what needed to be done or find an important link.

The onboarding process also included a lot of global meetings covering topics such as sales and company culture. It is beneficial to get this perspective to know where you fit in the Dynatrace big picture.

Onboarding meetings exercise

Secondly, the essential thing in all our lives – people. A huge part of getting onboarded to a new team is meeting other people. Currently, over 30 Dynatracers are working in Design and Experience, taking care of different areas: solutions, capabilities, writing, communication, research, and design. It was crucial to me to meet with each team member for a bit of chit-chat to better get to know each other. It's a fun thing to do: talking about experiences and hobbies for 30 minutes makes strangers become your friends, and it creates a mind map of team members and their areas of focus.

Working is all about communication, so doing such an activity makes it easier to reach out to somebody in the future!

Making the right environment and opportunities

If you talk about people and integration with different people, you can't mention the opportunities a friendly office brings! The last two years have changed everything and working from home has become our new habit. However, recent findings show that although it's much easier for old employees to work that way, it makes it more difficult for new joiners to get onboarded, feel the company's vibe, and get immersed in the culture. The current office encourages people to come to the office, have a coffee and cake, and enjoy it in shared spaces with different people. Such an environment helps you meet new people who might help you in future projects.

Want to join Oskar’s team in Gdansk? Check out all our open positions on the Dynatrace careers portal.

Read similar stories:

• From Dev to PO: balancing technical excellence and customer value
• Java developer by day, software enthusiast by night

Entering the orbit: the importance of easing the onboarding process was originally published in Dynatrace Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.