30 Day Onboarding Plan for a New UX Designer
Are you a UX Designer or Product Designer joining a new team?
Are you a busy product manager that is hiring new teammates?
🗓 Do you have a 30-day plan?
🧐 Do you want to look at one for inspiration?
Here you go, this is a 30-day plan for onboarding new designers to the team, use it for yourself if you are starting a new role and you want to quickly add value to your new team.
If you are welcoming a new teammate, this will help you to quickly align the new member with the team and have them adding value quickly.
The plan includes details about:
🧽 The Learning Tour
🥅 One Month Goals
👀 Fresh Eyes Advantage
🎯 Getting to know the new manager
☕️ Getting to know the team (your new crew)
📝 Learning the products
🗓 At 30 days
🚀 After 30 days
Here is is, use it as your own, adapt and adjust it to meet your specific team needs.
🧽 Learning Tour
During the first month, aim to be a sponge. Please try to not start fixing things right away without knowing the systems, the context of the projects, and the people behind them. I firmly believe this will allow you to effectively identify opportunities and create logical plans and timelines to execute on.
🥅 One Month Goals
Meet and get to know the design team.
Meet and get to know the team(s) I'll be working with.
Learn the products.
Learn the internal processes.
Set expectations with the design manager.
👀 Fresh Eyes Advantage
This is your time to ask a ton of questions, good questions, and bad questions. Don't miss this opportunity to ask away. Get your new co-workers to feel like valuable gatekeepers that are sharing their knowledge. It's all about giving respect to gain respect with teammates.
Please don't go making any criticisms about anything because you probably will not have the proper context of the decisions that were made to arrive at the current state. It's important to keep an inquisitive mindset and ask questions about "how did we get here?".
🎯 Getting to know the new manager
One of the first things to do is get to know your new product design manager. Begin aligning on role expectations as soon as possible. It's best that you drive the conversation to understand their standard.
Some topics you might want to cover are
What does going above and beyond look like?
What do I need to do in order to succeed in this role?
How will I track and document work performance?
Are there any opportunities for support and training?
☕️ Getting to know the team (your new crew)
Start to learn what the team will expect from you as soon as possible. You'll want to know how they've worked with product designers in the past. Discover more about what they're working on and what gets them excited? What do they hope to achieve? Setting realistic expectations will come naturally if you genuinely get to know the team. Once realistic expectations are understood then there are opportunities to go above and beyond.
Not everyone will understand product design. It's a good idea to make your work visible to help Inform the squad of your expertise and experience. This will help them reach out when they see a similar problem.
📝 Learning the products
How is a project kicked off?
How is the design system or source of truth for designs used?
What does the design review process look like?
How often are design critiques?
Just jumping in and doing some work will help resolve many questions and help raise questions once more context is understood.
🗓 At 30 days
At 30 days you should have a better sense of the company, the teams, and the system. Diving into the customer journey from start to finish will likely be the next priority.
Some reflective questions for the 30-day mark:
What have I learned this month?
Was it interesting?/ Will it be interesting?
Am I interested in learning more?
What support do I have with projects?
🚀 After 30 days
How does the experience look for new users?
What about the power-users?
Is the experience seamless on mobile and web?
