onboarding-checklist

name	onboarding-checklist
enabled	true
description	Use when performing onboarding checklist — provides a comprehensive onboarding checklist for new engineering team members covering environment setup, access provisioning, codebase orientation, team introductions, and ramp-up milestones. This template helps teams deliver a consistent, thorough onboarding experience that gets new engineers productive quickly.
required_connections	[{"prefix":"ticketing","label":"Ticketing System"},{"prefix":"collaboration","label":"Collaboration Tool"}]
config_fields	[{"key":"team_name","label":"Team Name","required":true,"placeholder":"e.g., Search Infrastructure"},{"key":"new_hire_name","label":"New Hire Name","required":true,"placeholder":"e.g., Jane Smith"},{"key":"start_date","label":"Start Date","required":true,"placeholder":"e.g., 2026-04-01"}]
features	["ONBOARDING","ENGINEERING_MANAGEMENT","TEAM_PROCESS"]

Onboarding Checklist

Phase 1: Pre-Start Preparation (Before Day 1)

Complete before the new team member arrives.

• Assign onboarding buddy: ___
• Assign manager: ___
• Order equipment (laptop, monitors, peripherals)
• Create accounts:
  • Email
  • Source control (GitHub / GitLab)
  • CI/CD platform
  • Cloud provider console
  • Ticketing system
  • Collaboration tools (Slack, Teams)
  • Monitoring and observability platforms
  • VPN / network access
• Add to relevant team channels and distribution lists
• Schedule Week 1 meetings (manager 1:1, team intro, buddy sync)
• Prepare starter task(s) in the backlog

Phase 2: Week 1 — Environment and Orientation

• Welcome meeting with manager (team mission, expectations, 30/60/90 goals)
• Team introductions and social coffee chat
• Development environment setup:
  • Clone primary repositories
  • Run local build and tests successfully
  • Set up IDE with team-standard extensions and config
  • Verify access to staging/dev environments
• Review key documentation:
  • Architecture overview
  • Team working agreements
  • On-call expectations and runbooks
  • Incident response process
• First code change: small, low-risk PR (typo fix, test addition, doc update)
• Daily check-in with onboarding buddy

Phase 3: Weeks 2-4 — Ramp-Up

• Complete starter task(s) with buddy support
• Shadow an on-call shift
• Participate in sprint ceremonies (standup, planning, retro)
• Review recent incident postmortems
• Understand deployment pipeline end-to-end
• Cross-team introduction meetings:
  • Key upstream dependencies: ___
  • Key downstream consumers: ___
  • Platform / infrastructure team
• Complete any required compliance training
• Give feedback on onboarding experience so far

Phase 4: 30/60/90 Day Milestones

Milestone	Target	Status
First PR merged	Week 1
Starter task completed	Week 2-3
Independent feature work	Week 4-6
First on-call shift	Week 6-8
Lead a small project	Week 8-12
Onboarding feedback submitted	Day 30
1:1 check-in with skip-level manager	Day 60
Full team contributor	Day 90

Counter-Rationalizations

Shortcut	Counter	Why
"We can skip some steps for this case"	Adapt the workflow steps, don't skip them	Skipped steps are where incidents and oversights originate
"The user seems to already know what to do"	Complete all workflow phases with the user	The workflow catches blind spots that experience alone misses
"This is a minor case, full process is overkill"	Scale the process down, don't turn it off	Minor cases become major when unstructured; the process scales, not disappears
"I'll fill in the details later"	Complete each section before moving on	Deferred details are forgotten; real-time capture is more accurate
"The template output isn't necessary"	Always produce the structured output format	Structured output enables comparison, audit trails, and handoff to other teams

Output Format

Summary

• New hire: ___
• Team: ___
• Start date: ___
• Buddy: ___
• Manager: ___
• Current phase: ___

Action Items

• Complete all pre-start account provisioning
• Verify development environment works end-to-end
• Schedule all Week 1 meetings
• Review and update onboarding docs based on new hire feedback
• Conduct 30-day onboarding retrospective with new hire