Imagine this: A new hire joins your team excited but quickly feels lost. They don’t know who to reach out to, lack clarity on their role, and feel overwhelmed by expectations that haven’t been clearly communicated. For example, a sales hire might not know the tools they need to use or how their performance will be measured in the first month. These gaps can lead to frustration, delayed contributions, and disengagement.

An onboarding document addresses these challenges by providing structured guidance. It ensures new employees know their key contacts, understand team workflows, and have clear priorities from day one

Components of an onboarding document

Highlighting the macro and micro

An effective onboarding document includes both macro-level and micro-level perspectives:

Product Understanding: Introduce the company’s product, its unique selling points, and its role in the market. Ask them to go through the product multiple times. In you're a B2B company, ask them to sit out a few sales call.

Market Context: Provide insights into the industry landscape, key competitors, and market opportunities.

User Insights: Share information about target users, their pain points, and how the product addresses them.

Growth Documentation: Highlight past growth strategies, key metrics, and future goals to align new hires with the team’s objectives.

Team: Introduce them to the team and the heads of teams to gain a macro level context of all the functions in the company

First 90 days

Next step is to plan the first 90 days. The first step here is to define the OKR or key metrics that the new hires will be chasing. Next, plan the 30-60-90 days:

First 30 Days: Learning and integration—understand the team, tools, and workflows.

Next 30 Days: Contribution—start taking ownership of smaller projects.

Final 30 Days: Impact—deliver measurable outcomes aligned with team goals.

Engineering the Aha Moments

Aha moments during onboarding are critical for building trust, driving impact, and ensuring continuous learning. These moments can be engineered by:

Building Trust:

Schedule regular one-on-one check-ins to address concerns and provide feedback.

Driving Impact:

Assign meaningful tasks that allow new hires to see the value of their contributions.

Creating a Learning Map:

Provide access to resources and mentorship opportunities to encourage skill development.

In this project

Make the onboarding doc for the new hire. Remember, you only need to do this once, after which this can easily be replicated across.

With this, we've completed all the project sections of Building Growth Teams. You're now equipped to attract the best talent, have an unbiased evaluation process and setting up the candidates for success.

Pat yourself on the back, you've done a great job 🎊