An Onboarding Idea
January 01, 2026
A lot has happened in the last few months. I've moved from the UK to Australia (post coming soon once the stress has gone), I'm the proud father of my beautiful baby girl, and I'm looking for my next opportunity.
Back to my thought..
I've had some terrible onboarding experiences in my career, and I've had a few just ok experiences, maybe ONE great onboarding experience. It shouldn't be this way but it seems to always be.
It's understandable, you're hired to help build something, not write up how a future new joiner gets upto speed. Theres always a readme.md. It's always out of date.
I've been thinking a lot about what makes a good onboarding experience, and I've come up with an idea that resonates with me. It's also been a good excuse to build a Nextjs project (which i had very little experience with before).
The idea is simple, communication is probably the most important part of onboarding. The most frustrating part of trying to get started on something is trying to find all the obscure terms people put in tickets that everyone knows but no one has written down, because well we all know them on the team.
If you're a developer - you can read the code and get a good idea of the structure, rules and how things fit together. If you're a PO, PM or BA - you can look at charts, diagrams, tickets, epics, stories, tasks and the project documentation and have an idea of the right questions to ask to get upto speed.
But one thing is always missing, the terms, the acronyms, the lingo. The things that are so ingrained in the team that no one thinks to write them down. They're even sometimes pronounced differently depending on who you ask.
Add to that in a remote world, you don't have the luxury of overhearing conversations to pick up on these things. You're also not bumping into people in the kitchen to ask quick questions. So inevitably you're going to ask questions, lot of questions in the teams communication channels. Which can be annoying for the team, and you feel like you're bothering people. Times that by 10 hires and you've a big focus problem.
Which brings me to my idea. A way to capture these things in a way that's easy to find and easy to understand. Flash cards with audio and structered learning . Think of it as a ledger of terms, acronyms, lingo, audio and more.
It's not just for onboarding though, it's for any situation where you need to learn new terms. Which is why it has built in audio support and a flash card learning system. This was the biggy for me.
Eventually with plugins for easy access in all the common tools like Jira, Confluence, Slack, Teams, etc.
It's my experiment, im even using it to help myself learn cantonese - just an idea of the flexibility.
I'll be posting more about this in the coming weeks.