As your product gets bigger so does your team. And when you want to add a new member to the team it can be challenging. On one hand, you want them to get the handle of things as fast as you can, and fit in well with the other team members, but on the other hand, it’s hard since the product is always getting bigger and more complex, and even if you tell the new team member to ask as many questions as they can, sometimes they don’t even know what to ask. I thought about that a lot recently, and I truly believe that if you do these 3 things, then adding a new team member will become easier. 1. Let them know that you are there in an active way: Everyone wants to know that they matter, and for a new member it means the world if another member just comes and asks if they need anything, or if there is anything that they don’t understand and need an explanation about. Remember, even if you tell someone to ask questions, they don’t always feel comfortable to keep asking again and again and again. Let them know you are there, help them to ask questions. But beyond that, let them know they matter in the small things. Are they vegetarian? Is there any food that they are allergic to? You don’t know the impact of those kinds of questions, that shows you care. Let them know they matter, and they will be motivated to fit in as fast as possible. 2. Make sure they can technically start work as fast as possible: The way I see it, and you might want to think about the environment setup process. if your new member’s environment cannot be all set up and ready in 5 hours, something is not right, I’m talking about computers, screen(s), users of their own, the software they need to work with, permissions on the computer(No, It is not fun to call IT every time I need something), groups they need to be in(Whatsapp, Teams, Slack, Discord, etc). And for all the programmers, No one needs to get to a situation where after they clone the project to their computer and run the seeders, they don’t have enough data in the system to start with. make sure that your product has proper database seeders. 3. Create a user guide and technical documentation Documentations are important. They give us order, a place to go to understand things and to see them from the perspective of those who created them. Technical documentations help the developer understand how does the project is built, and give a technical overview of the project from the basics to the more advanced parts: folder structure, style guides, design patterns, etc. The technical documentation is supposed to help you understand how the system is working today, and how the different parts are connected. What are the different areas that the user can use? how does he use it? what is the purpose of each part? The user guide is really important as well. It is supposed to give me the point of view of the user itself. It is important to do that because it can help you as a developer to see what the user is seeing, and not what you as a developer see. It also makes it easier to simulate different scenarios better and quicker. For example, a new developer was given a task to solve a bug that after he sent 3 reports, and then goes to the dashboard, and click on the download reports button, and instead of downloading all 3 reports it downloads 1. The first step in simulating this situation is to send 3 reports, and for that to happen you need to create 3 reports, and then find the place where you send them, and to know all of that you need some kind of reference which explains how things work, a.k.a user guide. So these are 3 things that I think can help make the process of adding new members to the team much easier. I would love to hear your thoughts about this subject, and what you think can make this process easier. Also published here.
