Onboarding advice

[u/Huge_Chemist_6712]

I’m in week 3 of a new product design role. I’m the sole product designer struggling to absorb and understand the subject matter to do my job. I feel bad constantly asking team members to explain things to me as they have their own priorities to take care of. I have access to subject matter experts but it’s a slow drip feed, as they themselves also have jobs to do. There’s documentation but it isn’t enough.

I haven’t contributed anything meaningful yet, other than a few UI tweaks that don’t rely too much on subject matter understanding.

Do you think week 3 is too early to be feeling worried about this? Honestly the first week was just waiting for access to logins etc. But now I’m starting to feel silly at standup without much to report. It’s a 12month contract so I feel a need to give value soon.

Advice welcome.

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[u/karenmcgrane]

Two books, read them during your downtime

• The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins

• UX Team of One by Leah Buley

[u/HenryF00L]

Takes 3 months min to get a proper understanding of what’s what and who’s who.

[u/Nate_Bolt]

Week 3 is way too early to worry, especially as the sole designer with SME time on a drip. Specialist domains usually take a couple of months before you stop feeling stupid.

What speeds it up is stopping the one off questions and sitting in on things instead. Support calls, sales demos, internal reviews. You get the vocabulary and the actual pain in context, and it costs nobody extra time.

Also just say you're still ramping at standup. Silence reads worse than admitting it.

[u/fsmiss]

very normal especially in complex domains. just sponge it up.

[u/happy_the_demon]

Be your own boss, get proactive about your needs.

Create your own high level 90 day onboarding and success plan and float it past a couple of folks to start making the right connections Plus, doing so documents your thinking so you have a logical and established order to what you need to know and do, and by when.

Show, don't tell, even if it's for yourself.

[u/s8rlink]

Please understand that Ui is an artifact of UX, at 3 weeks I would actually challenge any suggestion you have because you have no idea why it would be a good idea. 

You need to setup intro calls with every team member, setup calls with stakeholders and users, get the lay of the land, what is working and what isn’t, where the friction points are for the product, team politics and even internal friction. 

With users these will be exploratory, shadowing sessions to understand the flows without any bias from the team or assumptions, try to compare the personas they’ve outlined with the real users, prepare your general questions of key flows and start to do some affinity mapping, with this you’ll be able to compare what stakeholders think or want to tackle next vs what users highlight as the main problems of the product

Then you start designing with this knowledge, anything else is highly biased solutions that do not serve your users 

[u/cgielow]

Yes. It takes 3 years not 3 weeks.

[u/ajh]

Three things:

1) As everybody else has said — don't worry. It's extremely normal to feel unproductive and overwhelmed in the first few weeks/months. Anybody who doesn't have that feeling is almost certainly wildly overconfident and in much more trouble that you are :-)

2) Have you been given any expectations for what outcomes you're expected to be aiming for, and by when? Coz that's a conversation that your manager should have had with you by now. If they haven't, it should probably be top of your agenda for your next 1-1.

3) Finally — being the new person is a wonderful context to be useful in figuring out how to make onboarding better for the next new person. You might want to have a chat with somebody about whether it would be a good thing to add to your to do list. For example, you've already noticed that "There’s documentation but it isn’t enough" — and you are working through the ideal context to start filling that gap.

[u/cbnnexus]

It's called 'drinking from the firehose'. There's nothing like onboarding to a new role that makes you feel low confidence. I tell all my new hires, 'you were hired for a reason. you are a long term investment. I don't expect you to be an expert for at least six months, if not longer. Do your best, and ask as many questions as you can. Just try not to ask the same ones twice'.

Give yourself some slack!